Bioethics News.
09/27/2016
Why Do Obese Patients Get Worse Care? Many Doctors Don’t See Past the Fat
NY Times
You must lose weight, a doctor told Sarah Bramblette, advising a 1,200-calorie-a-day diet. But Ms. Bramblette had a basic question: How much do I weigh?
09/26/2016
Too Poor for Proper Plumbing: A Reality in 500,000 U.S. Homes
NY Times
TYLER, Ala. — The hard clay soil in this rural Southern county has twice cursed Dorothy Rudolph. It is good for growing cotton and cucumbers, the crops she worked as a child and hated. And it is bad for burying things — in particular, septic tanks.
09/23/2016
Researchers Confront an Epidemic of Loneliness
NY Times
The woman on the other end of the phone spoke lightheartedly of spring and of her 81st birthday the previous week. “Who did you celebrate with, Beryl?” asked Alison, whose job was to offer a kind ear. “No one, I…” And with that, Beryl’s cheer turned to despair.
09/21/2016
Study: Opioid use down in states with medical marijuana
The Olympian
States that allow medical marijuana to be used to treat pain show a decline in the use of opioids, according to a new study. The study, published in the American Journal of Public Health, examined 69,000 traffic fatalities in 18 states from 1999 to 2013, focusing on differences between states that legalized medical marijuana and those that had not.
09/20/2016
Voters barely worry about their own health. Do they really care about the president’s?
Washington Post
The first of three planned presidential debates will take place at Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y., on Sept. 26. Maybe it’s good the debate is slated for a gym. If Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are really serious about proving their physical vigor and stamina, they can do laps in the arena while they answer questions.
09/16/2016
Employees Are Paying A Bigger Chunk Of Health Insurance Costs
NPR
High deductible health plans are the new normal. Just over half of employees this year have a health insurance policy with a deductible of at least $1,000, according to a survey of employers from the Kaiser Family Foundation.
09/15/2016
Stop ignoring misconduct
Nature
The history of science shows that irreproducibility is not a product of our times. Some 350 years ago, the chemist Robert Boyle penned essays on “the unsuccessfulness of experiments”. He warned readers to be sceptical of reported work. “You will meet with several Observations and Experiments, which … may upon further tryal disappoint your expectation.” He attributed the problem to a ‘lack of skill in the scientist and the lack of purity of the ingredients’, and what would today be referred to as inadequate statistical power.
09/14/2016
How the Sugar Industry Shifted Blame to Fat
NY Times
The sugar industry paid scientists in the 1960s to play down the link between sugar and heart disease and promote saturated fat as the culprit instead, newly released historical documents show.
09/13/2016
Hillary Clinton’s Reluctance To Address Health Issues Follows A Long Tradition
NPR
Hillary Clinton’s begrudging release of information related to her health on Sunday follows a pattern set by candidates and many who have won the Oval Office. It is a pattern of secrecy and, in some cases, cover-ups that would be scandalous if they occurred on other issues of policy.
09/12/2016
What It Feels Like to Die
The Atlantic
“Do you want to know what will happen as your body starts shutting down?”
My mother and I sat across from the hospice nurse in my parents’ Colorado home. It was 2005, and my mother had reached the end of treatments for metastatic breast cancer. A month or two earlier, she’d been able to take the dog for daily walks in the mountains and travel to Australia with my father. Now, she was weak, exhausted from the disease and chemotherapy and pain medication.
09/09/2016
Another scathing report causes more eminent heads to roll in the Macchiarini scandal
Science
The scandal surrounding Paolo Macchiarini, the former star surgeon who became famous for his pioneering trachea transplants, has prompted yet another round of resignations and firings at the highest levels of Swedish higher education. On Monday evening, Swedish Minister for Higher Education and Research Helene Hellmark Knutsson said she had dismissed the country’s chancellor in charge of all public universities, Harriet Wallberg-Henriksson, following the release of a sharply critical report by an independent commission that examined the Karolinska Institute’s (KI’s) hiring and management of Macchiarini. Wallberg-Henriksson was vice-chancellor of KI in Stockholm, a position comparable to that of a university president, when Macchiarini was hired, and played a key role in his recruitment.
09/09/2016
Blue ribbon report urges U.S. cancer moonshot to invest in 10 promising areas
Science
Vice President Joe Biden’s proposed moonshot to conquer cancer should invest in large collaborations, data sharing projects, and the promising cancer treatment known as immunotherapy, among 10 areas described in an advisory group’s draft report released this morning. The report was accepted (with one abstention) today by the National Cancer Institute’s (NCI’s) advisory board, which is expected to pass it on to the NCI director and then to a federal task force. Now, Congress just needs to come up with the money to pay for the moonshot, research advocates say.
09/08/2016
Cesarean Birth Linked to Risk of Obesity in Childhood
U.S. News
Infants delivered by cesarean section may face a higher risk of becoming obese, a new study suggests.
09/07/2016
Frenchwoman who got world’s 1st face transplant dies at 49
Washington Post
Isabelle Dinoire, a Frenchwoman who received the world’s first partial face transplant, has died 11 years after the surgery that set the stage for dozens of other transplants worldwide. She was 49.
09/06/2016
FDA Orders Antibacterials Removed From Consumer Soaps
NBC
Say goodbye to those “antibacterial” soaps. The Food and Drug Administration says they do little or nothing to make soap work any better and said the industry has failed to prove they’re safe.
09/02/2016
Zika outbreaks most likely to hit eight countries in Asia, Africa
Washington Post
The worsening Zika outbreak in Singapore and its potential to spread elsewhere in Asia and beyond is rapidly raising alarms among health experts. Singapore has at least 151 confirmed cases, authorities reported Thursday, with two involving two pregnant women. Neighboring Malaysiaalso confirmed that a 58-year-old woman who recently visited her Zika-infected daughter in Singapore had been diagnosed with the disease.
09/01/2016
The World May Soon Run out of Drugs to Treat Gonorrhea
Science
It’s another sign that an era of untreatable bacterial infections is inching closer. Today, the World Health Organization (WHO) released new guidelines for treating gonorrhea that reflect the sobering reality that this sexually transmitted disease is becoming ever more difficult to treat. WHO recommends no longer using quinolones, a class of antibiotics that has become less and less effective. And for the first time, the agency makes suggestions on what to do when none of the standard drugs work.
09/01/2016
Study: Ohio’s Abortion Pill Law Led to Worse Health Outcomes
Washington Post
Ohio’s restrictions on the so-called abortion pill led to a higher rate of side effects, more doctor visits and additional medical treatment for patients, according to a new study.
08/31/2016
When a Medical Test Leads to Another, and Another
A patient gets a CT scan to diagnose an abdominal pain. By chance the scan also reveals a small lesion in the kidney. Should the patient be told?
08/30/2016
Audits Of Some Medicare Advantage Plans Reveal Pervasive Overcharging
NPR
More than three dozen just-released audits reveal how some private Medicare plans overcharged the government for the majority of elderly patients they treated, often by overstating the severity of certain medical conditions, such as diabetes and depression.
08/29/2016
Understanding the Controversy Over Caster Semenya
NY Times
Caster Semenya of South Africa, heavily favored to win the Olympic women’s 800 meters, ran a quick opening round this week and then breezed past reporters. Who could blame her? Perhaps no female athlete has faced such brutal scrutiny by fellow competitors, sports officials and journalists.
08/26/2016
EpiPens are my armor against disaster. They shouldn’t be priced like a luxury.
Washington Post
The last time I refilled my EpiPen, in November, I paid $365.63 out of pocket for two auto-injectors. I looked that number up Thursday morning after the news broke that Mylan, the company that makes EpiPens, is bowing to public pressure and will startoffering discounts after years of hiking prices.
08/25/2016
Doctors Get Disciplined For Misconduct; Drug Firms Keep Paying Them
NPR
Hundreds of pharmaceutical and medical device companies continue to pay doctors as promotional speakers and advisers after they’ve been disciplined for serious misconduct, according to an analysis by ProPublica.
08/24/2016
How Japan Is Dealing With Impacts Of Supporting The Oldest Population In The World
NPR
Nearly 27 percent of the people in the country are 65 or older. NPR’s Ina Jaffe visited Japan and tells Rachel Martin what she learned about why the population is aging.
08/23/2016
As lab-grown meat and milk inch closer to U.S. market, industry wonders who will regulate?
Science
The first hamburger cooked with labmade meat didn’t get rave reviews for taste. But the test tube burger, rolled out to the press in 2013, has helped put a spotlight on the question of how the U.S. government will regulate the emerging field of cellular agriculture, which uses biotechnology instead of animals to make products such as meat, milk, and egg whites.
08/22/2016
Justice Department says it will end use of private prisons
Washington Post
The Justice Department plans to end its use of private prisons after officials concluded the facilities are both less safe and less effective at providing correctional services than those run by the government.
08/19/2016
Scientists Engineer An Opioid That May Reduce Pain With Less Risk
NPR
Once people realized that opioid drugs could cause addiction and deadly overdoses, they tried to use newer forms of opioids to treat the addiction to its parent. Morphine, about 10 times the strength of opium, was used to curb opium cravings in the early 19th century. Codeine, too, was touted as a nonaddictive drug for pain relief, as was heroin.
08/18/2016
Florida Keys Opposition Stalls Tests Of Genetically Altered Mosquitoes
NPR
The fight against the Zika virus has a new weapon: the genetically engineered mosquito. It’s recently been approved by federal regulators and may soon be available in parts of the U.S. that are confronting the virus, like Puerto Rico and Miami.
08/17/2016
Spiking genomic databases with misinformation could protect patient privacy
Nature
Large genomic databases are indispensable for scientists looking for genetic variations associated with diseases. But they come with privacy risks for people who contribute their DNA. A 2013 study1 showed that hackers could use publicly available information on the Internet to identify people from their anonymized genomic data.