By Deborah Cho I’m a little late to this discussion, but I want to talk briefly about the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge and how we make our decisions on charitable giving. I’m sure by now most readers understand the basic concept of the challenge: individuals can choose to either record a video of themselves pouring ice…
By Arthur Caplan Art Caplan has a new video on Medscape laying out the principles behind rationing limited supplies of experimental ebola treatments. As he explains: I believe the answer to the question of who should receive the drug is: people we can both learn from and potentially help the most. I believe those are the 2 values…
By Annette Rid In “Ethical considerations of experimental interventions in the Ebola outbreak“, published yesterday by The Lancet, Zeke Emanuel and I discuss what we take to be the key ethical questions about the use of Zmapp and other investigational agents in the current Ebola epidemic. In essence, we argue that the national and international…
By Kevin Outterson A short article in the New Yorker on my favorite topic – business models for antibiotic use and innovation.
By Rachel Sachs On Friday, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced a challenge to the public: provide the most accurate forecast of the spread of chikungunya virus in each of the countries in the Pan American Health Organization, win $150,000. Innovation prizes like DARPA’s are increasing in popularity, with public and private entities…
By Arthur Caplan Art Caplan has a series of new opinion pieces out on the WHO ethics advisory committee meeting that approved the use of experimental drugs to treat patients ill with Ebola. He suggests deeper exploration of issues of informed consent, corporate responsibility, and resource allocation in this blog post for The Health Care…
By Ross D. Silverman Earlier this week, the World Health Organization, responding both to the international outcry over the rapidly rising number of Ebola cases and deaths across sub-Saharan Africa (and critiques of the speed of their action), and the news that western health care workers and ministry had found ways to get access to…
By Timo Minssen In Part II of this blog on legal issues relating to the revival of phage therapy I discussed the US Supreme Court’s decisions in Myriad and Prometheus, which might present major obstacles to the patentability of phage-related technology (a more detailed analysis of the Myriad and Prometheus decisions is available here). Yet,…
By Timo Minssen One of my previous blogs discussed the growing threat of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). I concluded that antimicrobial resistance is a growing and complex threat involving multifaceted legal, socio-economic and scientific aspects. This requires sustained and coordinated action on both global and local levels. A recent medical review on drug resistant tuberculosis supports…
By Donald W. Light Based on https://www.ethics.harvard.edu/lab/blog/436-new-prescription-drugs-a-major-health-risk Few people know that new prescription drugs have a 1 in 5 chance of causing serious reactions after they have been approved. That is why expert physicians recommend not taking new drugs for at least five years unless patients have first tried better-established options and need to. Faster reviews…
