Ethics & Health Law News

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Archive for category Health information and education

Chronic disease and using social media for health

Sep 10

Posted by Nancy Lentz in Chronic Disease, Health information and education, Internet, Medical Boards and Associations | Comments off

KevinMD blog, by Susannah Fox, 9 September 2010

“Speaking to the senior staff of the National Library of Medicine recently was like going before the best kind of murder board. Picture it: 30 of the nation’s smartest health information mavens around a polished conference room table, asking me sharp questions, suggesting new lines of inquiry, and offering their own insights. In other words, heaven. Our jumping-off point was the Pew Internet Project’s latest research on internet penetration, mobile use, and the social life of health information.”

Find article here.

Public Reporting of Hospital Hand Hygiene Compliance—Helpful or Harmful?

Sep 8

Posted by Edwina Light in Health information and education, Safety, US Health Services | Comments off

JAMA. 2010;304(10):1116-1117. doi:10.1001/jama.2010.1301
Authors: Matthew P. Muller, Allan S. Detsky
“Public reporting of hospital performance has been proposed as a means of improving quality of care while ensuring both transparency and accountability. …In 2002, it was estimated that approximately 1.7 million hospital-acquired infections (HAIs) and 99 000 HAI-related deaths occurred in the United States each year. Hand hygiene is considered the most important strategy to prevent HAIs. Since 2002, an increasing number of US states have mandated public reporting of quality indicators related to HAI prevention; to date, none have included reports of hand hygiene compliance in their mandates. This Commentary suggests the need for caution…”
Find extract here.

Marketing, Leadership, and the Health of Children

Sep 7

Posted by Edwina Light in Children, Health information and education, Nutrition, Public Health, obesity | Comments off

Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med. 2010;164(9):878-879. doi:10.1001/archpediatrics.2010.152
Editorial: J. Michael McGinnis
“Marketing works. This was a basic finding of the 2006 report of the Institute of Medicine’s Committee on Food Marketing to Children and Youth. That report, Food Marketing to Children and Youth: Threat or Opportunity? presented a comprehensive and rigorous assessment of all qualified scientific studies published on the relationship between food and beverage marketing patterns and practices and the dietary attitudes, beliefs, practices, and nutrition-related status of children and youth. The committee concluded that the evidence supported a causal relationship between television advertising targeted to children and teenagers and their food preferences, short-term food consumption, and—for children—longer-term dietary patterns.  With respect to marketing’s direct and causal association with overweight and obesity, the Institute of Medicine committee determined that the studies that were assessed were not long enough to offer a formal finding one way or the other…”
Find editorial and link to related research article here.

Dying in Australia

Sep 6

Posted by Edwina Light in Death, End-of-life Decisions, Health information and education | Comments off

MJA 2010; 193 (5): 249
Author: Martin B Van Der Weyden
“…This inevitability [of death], combined with the fear of an undignified or painful death, has imposed a widespread dread of dying among the community and occasioned calls for active euthanasia. It has also spawned the ascendancy of palliative medicine, with its noble aim of supporting a good death: painless, dignified and peaceful.  A feature of modern health care is its penchant for outcomes, reports and league tables, …view of this obsession, it seems only natural that we are now regaled with a new quality index focusing on dying!  Devised by the Economist Intelligence Unit, the business information arm of news magazine The Economist, the quality-of-death index ranks 40 countries using 24 indicators such as public awareness of end-of-life care and status indicators such as whether a country has a government-led palliative care strategy.”
Find editorial here.

Exceptional know how? Possible pitfalls of routinising genetic services

Sep 6

Posted by Edwina Light in Bioethics, Clinical Ethics, Genetics, Health information and education | Comments off

J Med Ethics 2010;36:529-533  doi:10.1136/jme.2009.035253
Author: Dagmar Schmitz
“Genetic testing practices are increasingly advancing clinical medicine. This process of ‘routinisation of genetics’ has been conceived as a medical and ethical problem mainly because of the assumption that non-geneticists might lack the necessary skills to provide these services. …Empirical findings seem to indicate significant variations not only in theoretical but also in practical knowledge between geneticists and non-geneticists. …From an ethical point of view, these variations in know how and background are especially relevant whenever the respective genetic service is concerned with medical information of exceptional normative quality, such as, for example, in prenatal genetic screening and diagnosis of untreatable conditions. Here, the clinically acquired practical knowledge of the non-geneticist could be particularly misleading insofar as there is no relation to therapy and—in a narrow sense—no clinical utility to be assessed.”
Find abstract here.

Stigmatisation of problem-drug users

Sep 6

Posted by Edwina Light in Health Services, Health information and education, Illegal drug use | Comments off

The Lancet,  Volume 376, Issue 9743, doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(10)61360-8
Editorial: “William S Burroughs II, the American Beat Generation author, published Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict in 1953 about life dependent on heroin (some editions use Junky). Junk was a slang term for heroin, possibly from users being seen as the “junk of society”, an early use of a stigmatising phrase.  60 years on, stigmatising labels for drug users remain topical, according to a report last week by the UK Drug Policy Commission, Sinning and sinned against: the stigmatisation of problem drug users. The Commission used a definition of problem drug use as injecting drug use or long duration or regular use of opioids, cocaine, or amphetamines. The Commission rather stumbled with this definition, because it wants to see the drug as the problem not the user. Use of the powerful connecting hyphen would have solved their dilemma: problem-drug user….”
Find editorial here.

Direct-to-Consumer Genetic Tests and the Right to Know

Sep 5

Posted by Nancy Lentz in Genetics, Health information and education, Human Rights | Comments off

Hastings Centre, By Ronni Sandroff, 40, no. 5 (2010): 24-25.
“My daughter recently convinced me to have my first genetic test, after she tested positive for factor V Leiden thrombophilia, a risk factor for blood clotting disorder. My doctor agreed to write an order for the gene test, but she didn’t think it would matter much if I tested positive. “After all,” she said, “you’ve lived with it this long.””
Find article here.

First Medical Marijuana Ad Airs in California

Sep 4

Posted by Nancy Lentz in Chronic Disease, Global and International Health, Health Law, Health information and education, US Health Services | Comments off

ABC News, By Ray Sanchez, 3 September 2010

“A decision by a Fox affiliate in California’s capital to broadcast what is believed to be the first paid ad for a medical marijuana dispensary has caused hardly a stir, according to the station general manager and the advertiser.”

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Legionnaires’ risk for travellers to Bali

Sep 4

Posted by Nancy Lentz in Global and International Health, Health information and education, Infectious Disease, Safety | Comments off

ABC News, AP, 3 September 2010

“The WA Health Department is warning travellers returning from Bali to look out for symptoms of Legionnaires’ disease. Two West Australians and one Victorian have recently returned from Bali diagnosed with severe pneumonia due to infection caused by Legionnaires’. The department’s director of communicable disease, Paul Armstrong, says middle-aged and elderly people are most at risk.”

Find article here.

FDA to Rule on Genetically Modified Salmon

Sep 3

Posted by Nancy Lentz in Animals, Biotechnology, Genetics, Health information and education, Medical Boards and Associations, Principle-Based Ethics, Safety | Comments off

Food Product Design, AP, 3 September 2010

“The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is close to ruling whether to approve for human consumption Aqua Bounty Technologies Inc.’s genetically engineered salmon, AquAdvantage, which has been bioengineered to grow twice as fast as traditional Atlantic salmon.”

Find article here.