Coronaviruses (CoV) are a large family of viruses that cause illness ranging from the common cold to more severe diseases such as Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS-CoV) and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS-CoV). A novel coronavirus (nCoV) is a new strain that has not been previously identified in humans. Coronaviruses are zoonotic, meaning they are transmitted between …
Tag: Health News
Aug 13 2014
Ebola: The Ethics And Politics
Medical ethicist Harriet Washington explains why most pharmaceuticals companies decline to produce drugs for the developing world yet use it for clinical testing
Transcript can be read here
Transcript can be read here
The awful ethical questions at the center of the Ebola emergency
By Julia Bellus, Vox
The Ebola outbreak in Africa has confronted ethicists and health officials with a terrible dilemma: when a limited amount of an experimental treatment exists, who should get access first?
There are currently no Ebola treatments on the market. But in this deadliest Ebola outbreak in history, two Americans missionaries received an experimental Ebola drug called ZMapp after getting the disease in Liberia.
Now, infectious disease experts around the world are proclaiming that African Ebola victims should have the same right. In response, both the Obama administration and the World Health Organization set-up expert groups to weigh the moral debates around the more widespread use of untested drugs in what has now been deemed an international health crisis.
To make sense of the thorny problems at the heart of this outbreak’s morality crisis, we called medical ethicists and doctors. Here are the four questions they say they are grappling with.
1) Is it okay to skip the drug testing pathway in a crisis? [..]
2) Why did Americans get an experimental drug while hundreds of Africans die of Ebola? [..]
3) What if the Ebola drug doesn’t work? [..]
4) Who should fund access to Ebola medicines?
These are the questions that try the oath that every doctor takes, Do No Harm.
Jun 22 2014
MLB Needs to Ban Chewing Tobacco
The recent death of retired San Diego Padres baseball player Tony Gwynn from salivary gland cancer has sparked a conversation about the use of chewing tobacco. Gwynn attributed his cancer to dipping tobacco, a habit that he picked up in 1981. Although, there are no studies linking tobacco to salivary gland cancer, as with smoking tobacco, it is considered a risk factor. ESPN sportscaster Keith Olbermann thinks that it’s past time that chewing tobacco use is banned from baseball.
Banning the habit would be a good idea, not just as a way of remembering Tony Gwynn but protecting players health and as an example for the fans of the game.
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