Trial By Error: No Ethical Review of Crawley School Absence Study

By David Tuller, DrPH This is a complicated post. Here are the key points. The rest is details: *Professor Esther Crawley and co-authors claimed a 2011 study in BMJ Open was exempt from ethical review because it involved the routine collection of data for “service evaluation.” Yet the 2011 study was not an evaluation of routine clinical service provision–it was designed to road-test a new methodology to identify undiagnosed CFS/ME patients among students with records of chronic absence. *To support the claim that the study was exempt from ethical review, Professor Crawley and co-authors cited a 2007 research ethics committee opinion that had nothing to do with the data-collection activities described in the 2011 paper. *For the 2011 study, school letters were sent to families of 146 student, inviting them to meet with Professor Crawley. In the end, only 28 were identified as having CFS/ME–meaning more than 100 families of students without CFS/ME received potentially disconcerting letters inviting them to a medical meeting about a sensitive issue. This type of pilot program is beyond the scope of what many would consider to be service evaluation. *A pre-publication reviewer, noting the data collection activities described in the paper, raised serious questions about the lack of ethical review. In her response, Professor Crawley did not provide satisfactory answers to the concerns raised by the reviewer, but BMJ Open published the paper anyway, without ethical r...
Source: virology blog - Category: Virology Authors: Tags: ME/CFS Source Type: blogs