March 31st, 2021Vaccine nationalism, stockpiling, and profit-driven manufacturing strategies have brought into sharp focus global health inequities and the plight of low- and middle-income countries as they wait in line for vaccines, write scientists at the...
March 24th, 2021During the first wave of the pandemic, doctors in England issued at least 500 “Do Not Resuscitate” orders without consulting the patients, their families or carers, and without taking into account each person's individual circumstances, writes...
January 13th, 2021When a scientists of the stature of Dr Anthony Fauci distort the truth to get people to what they want them to do, they are embarking on a dangerous game, writes Dr Vinay Prasad, in MedPageToday.
Prasad, a haematologist-oncologist and associate...
January 6th, 2021The British government, the NHS and the UK General Medical Council (GMC) need to reconsider their ‘unethical’ recruitment drive of overseas medical personnel, especially from low- and middle-income nations, write two specialists in the SA...
November 11th, 2020There has always been a need to ration scarce resources in SA, write Prof Keymanthri Moodley of the Centre for Medical Ethics and Law at Stellenbosch University and Theresa Rossouw of the Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Pretoria. In The...
With nations wrestling for access to a successful COVID-19 vaccine when released, a group of global experts has proposed the Fair Priority Model to regulate distribution.
When effective COVID-19 vaccines are developed, their supply will...
August 26th, 2020Care homes in the UK were asked by some National Health Service managers and GPs to place blanket “Do not resuscitate’ (DNR) orders on all their residents at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, in order to keep hospital beds free.
The...
Dr Adair Richards at the University of Warwick has developed a set of ethical guidelines to guide researchers on an ethical approach to deliberately infecting volunteers who have been given a vaccine candidate with COVID-19. He argues that this may...Medical Ethics
GPs' notes, currently unavailable to medical researchers because of patient privacy issues, could provide clues to help manage major health crises such as COVID-19.
And, according to a 'citizens' jury' study at Brighton and Sussex Medical School...
April 15th, 2020
Over the coming weeks and months, doctors and nurses are going to have to make soul-wrenching decisions decisions as to who gets access to scare intensive care resources, writes Professor Keymanthri Moodley, director at The Centre for Medical...
As hundreds of millions of people, maybe billions, avoid social contact to spare themselves and their communities from coronavirus, researchers are discussing a dramatic approach to research that could help end the pandemic: infecting a handful of...
February 26th, 2020
Patients need to be able to make informed consent when taking part in drug trials, writes University of Oxford's Jeremy Howick in The Conversation. But information must be provided in a way that doesn't scare them off unnecessarily.
Jeremy...
July 31st, 2019Virtually all top medical journals require authors to disclose potential conflicts of interest, but few – just 12% – apply that same medicine to their own editors by publicly disclosing editors’ financial ties to industry, Science Mag reports...
June 21st, 201717What happened to Beatrice Weisman before dawn on 29 August 2013, was not supposed to happen: the medical staff at Maryland General Hospital in the US found her in cardiac arrest, resuscitated her and kept her alive, writes Paula Span for The New...
Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu recently pleased for a ‘mind shift’ in the ‘right to die’ debate. MedicalBrief's William Saunderson-Meyer takes up the issue, arguing that it is time that physicians and lawmakers summoned the empathy ‘to...
