Environmental Health Research On Humans - Ethical Issues

Environmental Health Research on Humans – Ethical Issues Since the United States approved the regulations that controls the research on human subjects in 1970s, there have been many discussions and arguments concerning this approval on research on humans; the issues focuses clinical research like the risk management, the use of substances (drugs) with no therapeutic effect – placebos in a group, selecting random sample of a population, informed consent, adverse events and investigation on susceptible populations. â€Å" Most of those controversial researches no human subjects were the Department of Energy’s secret human radiation experimental exercise, HIV research in developed countries, and the Tuskegee Syphilis Study have been about medical†¦show more content†¦The environmental health research that involves humans is divided into observational and experimental. The first is a method of studies that collects information about human subjects in the natural environment; while the later deals with collecting informa tion on human subjects in a controlled condition. The design that is frequently used in observational research includes case-control studies, group studies, and cross-sectional studies and this design is mostly used in epidemiological and medical research. Under the case-control study, the investigators gather information on the environmental exposures of these groups of people with disease over a specific period of time and those people with similarity to the cases which do not have the disease in question. The group study investigators would follow one with particular characteristics like environmental exposure for a long time that ranges from 10 years or more, and the investigators would also follow the other comparison group who do not have the characteristics. And â€Å"in these studies, the investigators is attempting to determine if observed group differences between the groups, e.g. cases vs. cohort vs. control, are due to