Hot Topics: Public Health

Blog Posts (57)

February 12, 2013

Mutant virus sparks bioethics debate

[The Star] In a storage facility in the Netherlands, a mutant virus has been locked in a freezer for more than a year, unaware of the global debate swirling around it. As far as scientists know, this virus cannot be found anywhere else on Earth; it was...
February 8, 2013

Inequity in the U.S. – The Importance of Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA)

Original commentary by BEI Young Professionals Charley Willison. In order to achieve and maintain good health, utilization and access to healthcare services is a key necessity (Sade, 1430.)  Healthcare can prevent or ameliorate disease and disability,...
January 31, 2013

I Will Gladly Pay More Taxes to Expand High Schools Sports

My 14-year-old son Jordan did not make the JV basketball team in his high school.  Not very surprising really.  There is no freshmen basketball team at his school and only six freshmen made the JV, out of a class of more than 400 students.  Six fre...
January 28, 2013

A Brief History of Panic

[New York Times] In September of 1873, United States Senator J.R. West of Louisiana received a telegram from his home state whose terse lines spoke of abject desperation: The people are panic-stricken. All that could have left. The poor are nearly all ...
January 24, 2013

Bill proposed in Oregon would make cigarettes prescription-only drugs

 [KPTV] If you’re a regular smoker, you may want to keep an eye on a new bill in the Oregon Legislature.  Rep. Mitch Greenlick, from Portland, is sponsoring a bill that makes cigarettes a Schedule III controlled substance, meaning it would be i...
January 22, 2013

Rights Consciousness and Social Welfare Beneficence

Original commentary by BEI Young Professionals member Olivette Burton. A special tribute to Martin Luther King Jr.    Bioethics and social work have much work to do. The timeliness of evaluating our society’s progress involving human rights, pover...
January 15, 2013

The Moral Failure of HPV Vaccination

Arthur Caplan, Ph.D.

Among the greatest failures in American public health—and the list is a long one—is the rise in the incidence of cervical cancer.…

January 14, 2013

New York City Ties Doctors’ Income to Quality of Care

[New York Times] In a bold experiment in performance pay, complaints from patients at New York City’s public hospitals and other measures of their care — like how long before they are discharged and how they fare afterward — will be reflected in ...
January 10, 2013

NOVARTIS CEO: Big Pharma Has To Move Beyond Just ‘Selling The Pill’

 [Business Insider, Max Nison] Swiss drugmaker Novartis recently lost patent protection on its best selling product, Diovan.  They don’t have anything coming soon which looks like it could replace it. It’s a problem throughout the indus...
January 7, 2013

Delivering the promise of public health genomics

[The Guardian] Since the completion of the human genome project in 2003, scientific activities that were unheard-of a decade ago, such as sequencing the genes of a newly emerging virus in days, the ability to screen for inherited diseases and the poten...