By Kelsey Berry Much of the recent Ebola coverage has brought to the forefront principles of disaster triage and served as a reminder of the inescapability of rationing health care resources. A piece in The New Yorker recently highlighted the plight of pregnant women and their apparent exclusion from standard Ebola wards in Sierra Leone. Professor and Ethicist Nir…
By Kelsey Berry In a recent article in Science Translational Medicine, former NIMH Director Steve Hyman explores possible reasons for the policy failure to prioritize treatment of mental disorders worldwide, even when evidence and cost-effective interventions are available and validated. Hyman notes a number of potential factors, loosely falling into four categories. Stigmatization challenges; Fear…
By Deborah Cho It’s been over half a year since the beginning of the current Ebola outbreak in West Africa, yet the number of cases and deaths from the disease continue to rise. The total case count as of September 29, 2014 is 6,574 and total deaths are at 3,091. Even so, the international response,…
By Zachary Shapiro Hello from the Post-Trial Responsibilities conference! I will be live blogging session 2: where speakers will be providing important perspectives on PTA. Barbra Bierer is monitoring the discussion. We started with Richard Klein calling in from FDA: Richard is talking about post-trial responsibilities. He points out that there is a justice issue…
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 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 Arthur Caplan Amidst news from Spain that a 75-year-old Catholic priest has received the experimental treatment ZMapp for Ebola, Art Caplan critiques what he describes as the “bad science” behind choosing its recipients: ZMapp is not the answer to the Ebola epidemic ravaging West Africa. There is no chance of getting a significant amount of this drug…
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 Michael Young In 2012, the FDA introduced a novel pathway for expedited review of breakthrough therapies. The ‘breakthrough-drug’ designation was carved out by the Food and Drug Administration Safety and Innovation Act (FDASIA), which provided for expedited development and review of any drug “intended, alone or in combination with 1 or more other drugs,…
