By Kathleen West As the world watched Prince William place the new royal baby, reluctantly snug in his car seat, into a vehicle a few weeks ago, my thoughts were not limited to, “Oh, how cute!” After two months researching and collecting a dataset to capture the U.S. laws and regulations for child passenger restraint…
By Michele Goodwin Anthony Stokes, a fifteen year old kid from Decatur County, Georgia, is expected to die in a matter of months, according to his doctors at the Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. Maybe, they say, he will live for six months. Who knows? Anthony suffers from an enlarged, increasingly less functional heart. His condition…
By Dov Fox 86 members of the U.S. Congress have requested an end to the federal policy that prevents men who have had sex with men from giving blood. Advances in blood screening technology have discredited the medical justification for this exclusion. And our country’s current critical blood shortage makes it dangerous for public health.…
By The Petrie-Flom Center 2014 Annual Meeting Section Panel Saturday, January 4, 2014, 2:00–3:45 p.m. Sustainability and Health This panel will explore the effects of the environment on health in western nations and the role that sustainability initiatives play with regard to wellness. The panel will be interdisciplinary, broadly spanning topics in health, environmental, and…
By Wendy Parmet Public health law took another hit this week. In a unanimous decision (starting on p. 22), the Appellate Division of the New York Supreme Court affirmed a trial court’s earlier ruling striking down the New York City Board of Health’s ban on the sale of large sugary drinks. In an opinion authored by…
By Nicholson Price In a unanimous opinion (pdf) in Cook v. FDA, the DC Circuit just held that FDA must prohibit the importation of misbranded or unapproved new drugs, including those made by unapproved manufacturers abroad. In this case, a set of prisoners on death row sued FDA to require it to prohibit the importation…
By Arthur Caplan Art Caplan has a new piece at time.com discussing a recent study that examines the scientific evidence behind claims that smoking in public harms non-smokers–and finds it wanting: […] as a new paper by tobacco control proponents Ronald Bayer and Kathleen E. Bachynski of Columbia’s School of Public Health, in the respected journal Health Affairs shows, the…
By Arthur Caplan Art Caplan has published an opinion piece at NBCNews.com calling for an end to the ban on blood donation by gay men in the United States: The United States is facing a health care crisis. Our supply of blood is dangerously low. The American Red Cross reports that across the nation blood…
By Alex Stein According to the recent New York Court of Appeals’ decision—Applewhite v. Accuhealth, Inc., 2013 WL 3185185 (N.Y. 2013)—governmental immunity is a starting point for any inquiry into EMTs’ liability for malpractice. The Court based this immunity on the famous “duty to all is duty to none” principle: in providing a vital emergency…
By Y. Tony Yang, ScD, LLM, MPH More and more frequently, the media are reporting two potentially related and troubling developments: an alarming increase in outbreaks of deadly infectious vaccine-targeted diseases and the growing refusal by parents to allow their children to be vaccinated. (See this recent U.S. News & World Report article on cases…
