The need for ethics committees in evaluating (women's reproductive health) research protocols in African countries.

century has made significant progress in the treatment of such diseases. However, even after the discovery of a treatment for a medical condition, there is often the need to improve on its efficacy or find a more promising alternative. When drugs are discovered to be efficacious for a medical condition, over time and with more understanding of the medical condition, there is often the need to seek more effective drugs with fewer side-effects. This is perfectly in order as it amounts to making progress in medical science. Consequently, it means that even in the 21 st century medical progress relies on ongoing research on human beings. As a result, an interaction between researchers and research subjects is extremely important even where drugs and treatment already exists. And clearly, it is even more important in the discovery of treatments for hitherto unmanageable diseases. Without research subjects’ participation in clinical trials, researchers cannot know the efficacy or side-effects of a new drug, both of which are essential before one can bring a drug to the market. A scientist who believes that s/he has discovered a new drug for a medical condition would naturally want to conduct his/her trials on research subjects as soon as possible. And given that investigators are usually more knowledgeable about their research area than most of their potential research subjects, imbalances in knowledge make research subjects potentially vulnerable to exploitation and harm. This is why it is very important to regulate the conduct of medical research in order to protect potentially vulnerable subjects from exploitation in the research context. It is for this reason that international guidelines (such as the Declaration of Helsinki) and Research Ethics Committees are put in place to protect this category of research subjects from exploitation and harm. While research subjects are reasonably well protected in developed countries after the horrors of the Nazis and Tuskegee etc., there is still concern about research subjects in developing (African) countries.