A Critical Assessment of the Quality of Reporting of Ethical Protections in Medical Papers Published in Turkey.

The Declaration of Helsinki (DoH), the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) recommendations, and the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) guidelines outline the basic principles for ethical conduct and publication of human-subject research, most notably informed consent (IC) and research ethics committee (REC) approval. This retrospective observational study was a first study to investigate the quality of reporting of these protections in a selected sample of medical papers published in Turkey. A total of 573 research articles published in the official journals of six leading Turkish medical schools between January 2018 and December 2020 were searched for information on obtaining (i) REC approval, (ii) written IC from research subjects or their legal guardians/representatives, and (iii) an REC-granted IC waiver when it was found, as stated in the DoH, "impossible or impracticable to obtain consent" from research subjects. Similarly, a total of 166 case reports were searched for a statement about publication-specific IC, as was recommended by COPE. Despite a statistically significant improvement over the years, the overall rates were found to be unsatisfactory. The protections were particularly misused or underused in retrospective research, where the rates of reporting written IC (15.41% vs. 48.61%) and REC approval with date and reference number information (45.38% vs. 61.11%) were significantly lower than in prospective research (p < .05). Both the practices of seeking and granting an IC waiver when no IC was obtained were extremely rare (n = 3). It was also found that the requirement of structured ethical information in research papers was associated with higher levels of ethics compliance, and that medical publishing in Turkey needed specific improvements, including better implementation of the protections already adopted in principle, clearer instructions for authors, more rigorous editorial scrutiny, and greater commitment to rejecting substandard submissions.

The 1918 "Spanish Flu" Pandemic in the Ottoman Capital, Istanbul.

Although the general course, possible transmission routes, and actual sociodemographic destruction of the 1918 influenza pandemic in the Western world are well documented, the literature lacks similar data about the Middle East. On the calamity's centenary, this article aims to contribute to filling this gap, investigating the presence and effects of the pandemic in Istanbul, the city bridging the West and East, then as the capital of the Ottoman Empire. After the retrieval of the most relevant articles in Vakit, a daily Istanbul newspaper active throughout the pandemic, a variety of items, including articles with firsthand pronouncements from contemporaneous medical authorities and a clinical account of supportive autopsy findings, are scrutinized and interpreted. The reviewed data are concluded to indicate no epidemiological or factual exception, showing significant parallelism with the Western experience of the pandemic in terms of increased influenza mortality and morbidity, severe clinical presentation, common misinformation and misdiagnosis, and failure to provide effective prevention and medical treatment.