Ethics And Research Principles Practice Test

A team of epidemiologists is investigating an outbreak of a foodborne illness linked to a specific restaurant. To identify the source, they need to access medical records of patrons who have recently eaten there and subsequently visited the emergency department. The investigation is deemed a public health emergency, and obtaining individual consent from each patient would cause critical delays in stopping the outbreak.

A team of researchers is developing a novel chemotherapeutic agent for pancreatic cancer. They plan to conduct a randomized controlled trial comparing the new agent to the current standard-of-care chemotherapy. To be ethically justifiable, the researchers must have genuine uncertainty regarding the comparative therapeutic merits of each arm in the trial. They believe the new agent could be superior, but also acknowledge it may be equivalent or even inferior to the standard treatment.