One of the quirkier stories bobbing in the flood of “inappropriate behaviour” in media HQs, Hollywood and Washington comes from the House of Representatives this week. A strongly pro-life Congressman from Arizona, 60-year-old Trent Franks, has resigned after being accused of pressuring a staff member to act as a surrogate mother for him and his wife. It is one of three resignations this week for “inappropriate behaviour” from Congress.
Women who use hormonal contraception face a small but significant increase in risk for breast cancer, according to a large Danish study published in the New England Journal of Medicine this week.
Using data from about 1.8 million women over a decade, researchers found that for every 100,000 women, hormone contraceptive use causes an additional 13 breast cancer cases a year. That is, for every 100,000 women using hormonal birth control, there are 68 cases of breast cancer annually, compared with 55 cases a year among nonusers.
A 75-year-old Dutch man who helped his 99-year-old mother to die after her euthanasia request had been refused by doctors should be given a three-month suspended jail sentence, says a public prosecutor.
The case has been in the courts and the media for years. The woman died in 2008. Her son Albert Heringa was found guilty in 2013 but he was not punished. On appeal in 2015 the Dutch Supreme Court called for a retrial.
A group of researchers and ethicists delivered a warning in Nature in November about the dangers of neurotechnology and AI (sorry, guys, we missed this earlier). The Morningside group, headed by Columbia University neuroscientist Rafael Yuste, claims that existing ethical standards have been outpaced by galloping technology:
we are on a path to a world in which it will be possible to decode people's mental processes and directly manipulate the brain mechanisms underlying their intentions, emotions and decisions; where individuals could communicate with others simply by thinking; and where powerful computational systems linked directly to people's brains…
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The British Fertility Society has recommended that the time limit on freezing eggs for social reasons be changed from 10 years to 55 years, thus potentially allowing women to have children when they are in their 80s.
Freezing eggs for medical purposes is already permitted for 55 years. This allows girls made infertile by cancer treatments as toddlers, for instance, to possibly have children as adults. Backers of a higher limit for women who freeze their eggs for social reasons, like wanting to delay childbirth until they find a suitable partner or complete a satisfying professional career, say that…
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Karl Brandt, Hitler's personal doctor, on trial at Nuremberg
On August 20, 1947, an international tribunal which investigated the crimes of 23 Nazi doctors and bureaucrats involved in concentration camp medical experiments issued its verdict. As part of its judgment (seven of the men were sentenced to death) the tribunal also set a 10-point set of rules now known as the Nuremberg Code.
This called for the “voluntary consent” of the human research subject, an assessment of risks and benefits, and assurances of competent investigators. As an essay in JAMA by experts from the US and…
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First of all, thank you for being one of those more than 20,000 people who read our articles every month. When we started BioEdge more than 15 years ago, we never thought that it would have such a huge impact around the world.
Like everyone else, we do have a bias. We are trying to promote human dignity as a foundation for bioethics. With issues like euthanasia, surrogacy, gene editing, and organ markets in the headlines, we cannot afford to forget the ethical dimension of medical decisions.
Doctors at a Florida hospital’s emergency department were startled to discover the words “do not resuscitate”, together with a signature, tattooed to an unconscious man’s chest. Should they respect the request or not?
The 70-year-old man had no identification and no next-of-kin could be found. His blood alcohol was high. His health was very bad, with a history of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, diabetes, and an irregular heart rate.
One strand in the persecution of the Rohingya Muslims by the Myanmar government is population control. Since 2005, the government has tried to enforce a two-child policy. Back in 2015, Physicians for Human Rights complained that Millennium Development Goals were being used by the government to force the Rohingya to have fewer children.
And now, in the squalid camps across the border in Bangladesh which are now home to more than 600,000 Rohingya, the Bangladesh government is trying to sell the same message -- with no more luck than their Myanmar counterparts. Public health official Dr Pintu Bhattacharya…
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Canada’s new euthanasia laws are perplexing doctors who have to deal with suicide attempts. According to the National Post, there have been a number of reports of doctors who refused to treat people who had tried to kill themselves. In the case of poisons, remedies were readily available.
Quebec’s College of Physicians has issued an ethics bulletin which says that last year, “in some Quebec hospitals, some people who had attempted to end their lives through poisoning were not resuscitated when, in the opinion of certain experts, a treatment spread out over a few days could have saved them…
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