By Ross D. Silverman, JD, MPH (Twitter: @phlu) Fairbanks School of Public Health and McKinney School of Law, Indiana University, Indianapolis. This has been a big year for outbreaks of Vaccine-Preventable Illnesses (VPIs) in the United States. While we are only halfway through 2014, there have been more measles cases this year than we have…
By Kevin Outterson The First Amendment has been repurposed as a powerful deregulatory tool, especially in health care (NEJM on data privacy) and public health (NEJM on smoking). Amy Kapczynski at YLS has put together a timely and powerful conference, Public Health In The Shadow of the First Amendment. October 17-18 in New Haven. Register here. @koutterson
By Katherine L. Record, JD, MPH, MA Shortly after criticizing Massachusetts for incarcerating innocent individuals with substance use disorder (SUD) when drug rehab facilities are full, I received an email from a woman who lost her son to a heroin overdose just four months ago. “Is preventing an overdose by detaining the SUD sufferer not…
By The Petrie-Flom Center Harvard Law Today has posted a feature on Cass Sunstein’s keynote address at the 2014 Petrie-Flom Center Annual Conference, “Behavioral Economics, Law, and Health Policy.” Sunstein, who is the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard Law School and the co-author of Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, addressed the opening day of the conference…
By Katherine L. Record Can there be a silver lining to a drug epidemic that is so extreme it is deemed a public health emergency? As prescription opioid (painkiller) addictions drive individuals to heroin, there just might be. Heroin use has surged recently – seizures of supply increased by nearly 70% over the last few…
By Hosea H. Harvey About a year ago, my colleague Scott Burris blogged on this forum about the two polities of public health that compete for our visions – one view sees public health as “incredibly popular with citizens and lawmakers” and the other as the despised “nanny state.” Burris suggested that the former view is largely…
By Allison K. Hoffman In the U.S., the right to health is often held up as a utopian legal principle that other countries manage to embrace and that we shortsightedly spurn. What I learned working on a new project is that the right to health does not always lend itself to admirable ends. In some…
By Nikola Biller-Andorno Director, Institute of Biomedical Ethics, University of Zurich, Switzerland Safra Network Fellow, Harvard University (13-14) Visiting Professor, Div. Medical Ethics, Harvard Medical School (12-14) It is amazing how much heat a report can draw that simply states what has been all over town for some time now: We do not know if mammography…
By The Petrie-Flom Center The Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School and the Food and Drug Law Institute are pleased to announce an upcoming collaborative academic symposium: Emerging Issues and New Frontiers for FDA Regulation Monday, October 20,…
Please join us for a day-long conference at Harvard Law School on September 18, 2014, which will include presentations by leading experts and varied stakeholders as well as small group discussion and break out sessions that will work toward developing consensus in this difficult area. Key questions include: How should post-trial access be defined? What type of interventions…
