Researchers need to gain the confidence of local populations when doing large-scale clinical trials in poor countries

www.fiveyards.com

This year, 60,000 slum-dwellers in Kolkata, India, will take part in a trial testing the safety and effectiveness of an oral cholera vaccine.

Last November, the same population was injected with a potential typhoid vaccine, reports Paroma Basu in this article in Nature.

Besides their obvious benefits, the trials have highlighted the difficulties in carrying out large-scale clinical research in developing countries, says Basu.

As well as facing various bureaucratic hurdles, the researchers found it especially hard to gain the confidence of potential participants.

They succeeded in building a degree of trust by employing 250 citizens as health workers and sample collectors. The researchers believe this is the reason they managed to obtain informed consent from so many people.