Question: Despite what your research can achieve – less people getting ill – do you think it is moral to allow pneumonia patients (with a severe case or not) to give blood for your research after the treatment that they would have had to undergone?

Hannah Greenwood answered on 18 Jun 2015:

I think we have a moral obligation to try to improve the treatments we currently offer to patients to better treat the disease and ultimately cure it. Lots of older patients don’t survive pneumonia and those who do survive pneumonia then go on to have a very poor quality of life – they depend on others to help them eat, to get dressed, they become very weak and can no longer leave the house. I don’t think its fair to treat their disease only to then leave them worse of than they were before they got ill, especially not if we have ways to develop better treatments and potentially stop this happening. To do this we need to better understand the things that are causing the disease in the first place. Using samples from patients with the disease and comparing them to healthy patients then we can look at any changes and use this to make new treatments.
The tests that we do as part of our research study don’t require any additional blood tests to what the patient will receive as part of their normal treatment, they only require a small amount of blood (the patient won’t notice any difference) and of course we only include patients who have given us their very specific permission for us to do so. As scientists there are a lot of laws and rules that we have to abide by to make sure that we’re not taking advantage of any of our patients or exposing them to any undue risk. We explain exactly what the study is about to them and always ask their patients permission before including them in any study. They also have the absolute right to decline their participation or remove themselves from the study at any point should they not wish to continue, no explanation necessary.
Its not a perfect system, there are advantages to it but also was we could improve but for now, it’s all we’ve got to find new treatments and make sure they’re safe.

Hope this helps, it’s quite a long answer. Ask me any anything your not sure about