I thought this call for input would be of interest to some of our readers. The Nuffield Council on Bioethics is holding a public consultation on the ethical issues raised by online healthcare, telemedicine and commercial medical profiling technologies such as DNA testing and body imaging. These technologies and services are increasingly focused on the […]
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Event: Medicine Under Pressure: Arts Week highlight
This looks like an interesting event at Queen Mary, University of London on the 29th of April. High-profile lawyer Phil Shiner will join a timely debate on ethics, medicine and human rights, an Arts Week event. In ‘Medicine Under Pressure: The Law and Ethics of Medicine in Conflict Situations’ a panel of distinguished legal and […]
Post Mortems by MRI?
The BBC is reporting that families may be able to request that post-mortems be carried out by MRI rather than invasively under new proposals. The qualification here is that [c]oroners [would] make the decision on a case-by-case basis as MRI scans may not always be the appropriate means to determining a cause of death, the […]
UK among Worst Places in Europe to be a Child
The Child Poverty Action Group has published a report today in which the UK is accused of being among the worst places in Europe to be a child on a range of measures. For example, the UK comes 24th out of 29 countries when it comes to the assessment of birth-weight; it’s 21st when it comes […]
Irish Euthanasia Lecture Cancelled
A curious story from the Irish Times: a lecture by Len Doyal on euthanasia had to be cancelled after disruption from protesters: he’s now complained to the President. The protesters apparently shouted obscenities and, er, the Rosary. There are more details here. In the meantime, I just can’t help myself: Thanks to Richard Ashcroft and […]
The Benefits of not being an Alcoholic
Some health policies are very well thought-through and their merits are obvious. Others take a bit of time and thought for their merits to become clear. Some are well-meaning but wrong. And some are mad as a bag of wasps in a salad-spinner. Into which category should we put James Purnell’s suggestion that alcoholics should […]
The ethics man strikes again – ethics checklists
By David Hunter Daniel Sokal has been busy again Success from surgical checklists breeds idea for ethical checks suggesting that clinicians ought to consider adopting an ethics checklist to use on their rounds. […]
What does the Press Think about HPV Vaccination?
It would seem that it depends what country you’re in. I suspect it’s only a matter of time before someone suggests that it’s sales, rather than science, that determines newspapers’ editorial policy. Heaven forbid. […]
An Easter Sperm Story: The Defeat of Death
This from the bioethics.net blog: A woman’s 21-year-old son dies in a Texas bar fight. The bereaved mom wants the son’s clearly virile and tenacious genes to live on in the next generation and fights to have his sperm collected and stored so that someone may carry his seed. She says, on the one hand, […]
Sperm Banks and Product Liability
The New Scientist is carrying this rather peculiar story: a sperm bank in New York is being sued under product liability law by a girl who claims that her conception was from “faulty” sperm. The 13-year-old girl named in the suit has Fragile X syndrome; apparently, she does not have to show that the sperm bank […]