Due to a growing number of new diseases, the necessity of the ethical aspect of research involving human beings has expanded the growth, as well as the insertion of nurses within the scientific context. Our main goal here was to present the number of nursing studies submitted to a Research Ethics Committee of a referenced public institution in the care of infectious diseases in the Northeast of Brazil from 2000 to 2004. A retrospective evaluating study of the face pages of the projects was developed during the second trimester of 2004. The results indicated that the nursing protocols corresponded to 35.4% of all the projects received during this period, involving especially the following set of themes: AIDS (54.9%) and nursing work within the context of infectious illnesses (17.7%). The conclusion was that there was an expressive demand for nursing protocols research in priority themes in Brazil involving ethical evaluation.
Nursery; Comunicable diseases; Research; Ethics
