Tuesday, November 13, 2012 12:30-2:00 Wasserstein Hall, Classroom 3019 Harvard Law School In the late 1940s, US and Guatemalan researchers conducted a host of experiments on vulnerable Guatemalan subjects, purposefully exposing them to and infecting them with a number of STDs without their consent. The experiments were kept hidden for more than half a century,…
By Scott Burris Kathy Ward is a veteran public health worker in Nebraska. She has a neat idea, which I summarize here in mostly her words: Public health policy needs more proponents who are knowledgeable and able to express their positions freely. The shortage of advocates presents a danger for public health in a time…
By Michelle Meyer As most readers of this blog well know, health disparities of various kinds are rampant in the U.S. — in obesity, infant mortality and morbidity, cardiovascular health, and many other areas. In most cases, however, we seem to know more about the extent of health disparities than we do about what causes…
By Scott Burris Somewhere along the way, environmental law and public health law got separated. Despite the importance of clean air and water to public health – not to mention parks, recreation, salubrious zoning – the two fields developed independently in the law. That’s changing in a lot of ways, and one very good example…
By Arthur Caplan Art Caplan has a new article out in the Journal of Law, Medicine, and Ethics – “Free to choose but liable for the consequences: should non-vaccinators be penalized for the harm they do?” (subscription required) Here’s the abstract: Can parents who choose not to vaccinate their children be held legally liable for any harm…
By Nadia N. Sawicki On Monday, an Italian court convicted six scientists and a government official of manslaughter for providing the townspeople of L’Aquila with “inaccurate, incomplete and contradictory” information about risk of a 2009 earthquake in which 309 residents subsequently died. The prosecutors in the case successfully alleged that the scientists, all members of the…
By Scott Burris Graduated Drivers’ License Laws have apparently been a major success in reducing crashes among novice drivers. (A couple of studies have suggested the laws might just be postponing crashes, but so far that hypothesis remains unproved, and the weight of expert opinion seems to be that the association is spurious.) There has…
By Jennifer S. Bard I’m sure many of us are talking about the contaminated steroid injections which have spread a fungal form of meningitis Exserohilum rostratum across the country. The CDC, which as is usually the case is doing an excellent job of providing clear and current information, reports that as of “October 17, 2012,…
By Brendan Abel, JD Countless regulations have been enacted over the past 35 years to protect children from unnecessary clinical testing. Federal regulations, the Belmont Report, and professional guidelines all state that children should be enrolled in clinical trials only when the research is a high imperative. Federal research regulations insist that absent a potential…
by Jonathan J. Darrow On October 3, 2012, the FDA’s Division of Professional Drug Promotion issued an untitled letter to Genentech in connection with its cancer drug Tarceva. Tarceva (erlotinib) was approved in 2004 for the treatment of non-small cell lung cancer, and has since been approved, in combination with Gemzar (gemcitabine), for the treatment…
