A Primer on Medical Law, Bioethics and Human Rights for African Scholars

Call: 031-260-1556

The new era of genomics and biotechnology has revolutionised medical practice to an extent that healthcare practitioners are now able to provide individualised medical care through the sequencing of the human genome. However, personalised medicine and scientific research is often bound by a set of ethics and laws. Medical law and Bioethics is a field that is fairly young in Africa. In order to educate both healthcare practitioners and students in this field, Professor Sylvester Chima, Head of the Programme of Bio and Research Ethics and Medical Law at the Nelson R Mandela School of Medicine recently published his third book on the topic.

Titled: A Primer on Medical Law, Bioethics and Human Rights: For African Scholars, the book draws on African case studies and South African law to illustrate the dynamics of the field. A key feature of the book that sets it apart from other books available in this field is that it is specific to the African context.

The book’s 21 chapters focus on subjects ranging from confidentiality, ethical and legal issues in the management of infectious diseases and epidemics, to children’s rights, euthanasia, and criminal negligence.

‘Physicians, scholars and the general population in Africa are not fully aware of their rights as both patients and medical practitioners as compared to the population in the developed countries. For example, in Western countries, the population is very aware of patients’ and consumer rights; unfortunately this has given rise to the increased number of law suits each year. In order to reduce the number and cost of medical malpractice law suits, medical training institutions in the developed countries of Europe and the United States of America have introduced ethics and medical law as a compulsory subject for all aspiring healthcare practitioners,’ Chima said.

‘What we need in Africa is more textbooks like this one that is written in the African context. We also need to train more bioethics specialists which will strengthen the discipline and in turn contribute to advocating for respect of the human rights of all patients and research participants in Africa,’ he added.

Nigerian by birth, Chima spent more than 20 years of his academic career in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Caribbean promoting ethical scientific research. Trained as a medical doctor in Nigeria, he practiced for many years in his home country before he went on to Howard University in the US where he graduated as a Pathologist.

In 2006, Chima qualified with a Masters Degree in Law from Northumbria University, Newcastle-upon-Tyne (England). He has worked around the globe in various prominent institutions such as Yale-New Haven Hospital in Connecticut, the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda and Mount Sinai in New York; St Christopher’s College of Medicine in Luton in the United Kingdom, St Mathew’s University School of Medicine in Grand Cayman in the Cayman Islands and the International American University College of Medicine in St Lucia in the West Indies.