With the modern advances and technological breakthroughs in biomedicine, scientific experiments involving human subjects had increased. Since the American gynecologist Marion Sims (d.1883), who conducted a scientific research on some selected African women suffering from prolapsed uterus disease, or American physician Walter Reed’s (d.1902) team who gave germs of yellow fever to 22 human subjects to test if fever is transmitted by particularly mosquito species, as well as the Tuskegee Syphilis Study that was conductedfrom 1932 until 1972, or the scientific experiments conducted by Nazis of Germany on large numbers of prisoners, clinical trials on human subjects have become part of the scientific activities. These and many other scientific experiments conducted on human subjects had shown the extent of potential threats of unregulated scientific experiments on human life. Serious moral and legal concerns are then raised towards the morality of these activities. These concerns covered four major areas; safety, sanctity of the human body, consent and validity of experiment. This paper uses textual and analytical methods and aims to review Muslim jurists’ opinions on the permissibility of conducting clinical researches that uses human subjects. The opinions of the Muslim jurists are then compared to that of bioethical codes and declarations such as the Nuremberg Code, coined in (1947) and the Helsinki Declaration that was formulated by World Medical Organizationin 1964. Fiqhand legal literature on this subject is exposed, and the moral contents of such writings are analyzed. The study is expected to come up with a comparative account of conventional and Islamic responses to modern clinical trials on human subjects.
As nursing education gets more complex, leadership styles employed in these nursing training institutions played a crucial role in achieving nurse educators’ job satisfaction. As such, this study intends to elicit attributes and practices of nursing academic leaders’ transformational and transactional leadership styles in enhancing the job satisfaction of nurse educators. The qualitative method used for the study was based on the phenomenological approach to gather an in-depth understanding of human behaviour through interview, documents and observations. Purposive sampling was undertaken in selecting nine nurse educators from three nursing colleges from Johor and Melaka. Data from the interview were summarized in answering nurse educators' job satisfaction and perceived leadership styles and practices of nursing academic leaders. The responses from the verbatim transcriptions were analysed using the software Atlas Ti. The strong relationship between nursing academic leadership styles and nurse educators’ job satisfaction suggested that the academic nursing transformational leadership style played a prominent role on subordinates’ job satisfaction and that nursing academic leaders’ transformational leadership practices and attributes had the ability to encourage subordinates to achieve more than what they planned. Transactional leadership practised by the nursing academic leaders indicated a weak link to subordinates’ job satisfaction as the leaders’ emphasis on payoffs for performance and corrective actions were not as acceptable to that of transformational leadership attributes practised by the leaders. The study uncovered effective leadership was enacted via engaging leadership where the leader enabled the development of an organization modelled by a culture of integrity, transparency, accessibility and genuine valuing of others and that their contributions were concerned for the development and well-being of others. In fact, moral attributes like integrity, trustworthiness and commitment to work as well as decision making styles of leaders such as being consultative leader are among the basic Islamic teachings on establishing worthy social order.
Presently, there is no specific federal legislation governing articular cartilage tissue engineering (ACTE) experimenta- tion practices in Malaysia. However, there are related regulations and guidelines provided by government agencies to oversee and guide such practices. The rules and regulations provided in the documents have the essential aim of safeguarding public health through ensuring that non-clinical studies reach a certain quality, efficient and safe for hu- man use. There are themes identified when scrutinising relevant documents which includes, the need for authorised personnel and the establishment of facilities in conducting such experiments, the aspect of cell-scaffold construct development, the use of human materials, the aspect of biosafety, animal care and use during the experiments, and considerations on the impact on the environment. The individual laboratory or facility shall adopt and adapt these standards as deemed appropriate by the ACTE researchers to ensure that non-clinical studies are conducted in a proper and ethical manner.
In recent decade, aquaculture species, including fish are under danger from bio-aggressors like viruses, bacteria, parasites and fungi. These organisms harm either spontaneously or through aquatic animal husbandry practices or both. The chemicals employed in aquaculture are drugs like antibiotics used to treat diseases, chemicals introduced through construction materials and hormones used to alter the reproductive viability, sex and growth rates. Drugs used to treat disease are the most dangerous to the fish. These persistent antibiotics tend to increase antibiotic-resistant free-living bacteria, thereby altering the composition of normal marine and freshwater bacterial flora. Evidence suggests that these antibiotic-resistant organisms in the marine environment will, in turn, pass their antibiotic resistance genes to other bacteria including human and animal pathogens. Antibiotic treatment in aquaculture is achieved by medicated baths and medicated food. In both cases, the probability exists for antibiotics to pass into the environment, affecting wildlife, remaining in the environment for extended periods of time and exerting their antibiotic effects to human. In this manner, potential alterations of the diversity of the marine micro-biota produced by antibiotics may alter the homeostasis of the marine environment and affect complex forms of life including fish, shellfish, marine mammals, and human beings. The contamination of surface waters with antimicrobials has become an increasing public health concern because of the emergence of multi-resistant pathogens. Efforts to make progress on these issues require us to raise, confront and enact some difficult ethical decisions that will affect the living standard of human. Nevertheless, excessive antibiotic use in aquaculture should be of high concern to the aquaculture industry and its regulators, to public officials dealing with human and animal health and with the preservation of the environment, and to non-governmental organizations dealing with these issues.