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Bamba Gaye, MD, MPH, MSc, PhD, Adjunct professor, Université Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar

The bias in medical research: Africa carries a huge disease burden but is missing from clinical trials

Modern medicine prides itself on being a universal science, built on evidence from clinical trials.

But there’s a bias in medical research. While Africa accounts for roughly 25% of the global disease burden and 19% of the global population, the continent’s people are largely invisible in some clinical trials.

The scale of the erasure is revealed in a landmark study of 2,472 randomised controlled trials globally published between 2019 and 2024.

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