By John Tingle Healthcare providers and policy makers can avoid the expense of reinventing the wheel if they try and look beyond their shores for solutions to patient safety problems. In the UK the work of the patient safety unit of WHO in Geneva helps NHS healthcare providers through the development of patient safety tools…
By Gregory M. Lipper For an ambitious, aggressive disease like Zika, Texas is an ideal home. Earlier this week we learned that Zika—a nasty virus that has spread to over 25 countries—was transmitted by sex to a resident of Dallas. Six more cases of Zika have also been confirmed in Harris County, Texas. The appearance…
By Holly Fernandez Lynch In the late 1940s, US government scientists, in collaboration with Guatemalan counterparts, were involved in a horrible array of experiments on human subjects in which a variety of vulnerable groups in Guatemala were intentionally infected with syphilis, gonorrhea, and chancroid and left without treatment. [For more on how they ended up in…
By Nicholas J. Diamond The Hill is abuzz with talk over the Syrian refugee crisis and whether refugees should be allowed to resettle in the U.S. A group of former national security experts from both Republican and Democrat administrations recently urged Congress to allow refugee resettlement in the U.S. In contrast, Texas recently filed a…
By I. Glenn Cohen Imagine you had 10 million dollars to spend to save the life of one person whose name you knew or 10,000 whose name you didn’t? How would you spend it? What would you think of a government policy that chose to save the 1 person rather than the 10,000? I would…
By Katherine Kwong Artemisinin, a drug used to treat malaria, has been a recent topic of public discussion after its discovery was recognized with the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine on October 5. The 2015 prize was awarded to three researchers who developed treatments for parasite-caused diseases, with half the award going to Youyou…
As if the proposed revisions to the Common Rule weren’t enough to process, the Council for International Organizations of Medical Sciences (CIOMS) just released its proposed changes to the current CIOMS Ethical Guidelines for Biomedical Research (last revised in 2002). CIOMS invites public comments until March 1, 2016, at which point the CIOMS Working Group…
By Timo Minssen I am pleased to announce our recent paper entitled “The Impact of Broccoli II & Tomato II on European patents in conventional breeding, GMO’s and Synthetic Biology: The grand finale of a juicy patents tale?”, which is available on SSRN, and forthcoming in Biotechnology Law Report, Vol. 34, Number 3 (June 2015), pp. 1-18….
By Wendy Parmet Australia’s recently announced “no jab, no pay” policy offers a potent reminder of the all-too-common tendency to penalize vulnerable populations for public health problems. Like many other countries, Australia has experienced a worrisome increase in the number of families deciding not to vaccinate their children. In response, the government of Prime Minister Tony…
By John Tasioulas The international community is currently in the process of formulating the Sustainable Development Goals that will guide the post-2015 development agenda. Many UN bodies, NGOs, governments and members of civil society have in the past stressed the vital need to embed the SDGs in a human rights framework. However, in July 2014, the UN’s Open Working Group…
