Bio-Ethics
The last day of her life — an Alzheimer’s victim’s story
The right-to-die issue has raised controversy in the SA media recently (See MedicalBrief 0057) when the death of terminally ill Cape Town man occurred just hours before a landmark High Court judgment granted his application for assisted dying. Even more complicated is the issue of what happens when the patient does not have a terminal affliction.
When well-known US university professor Sandy Bem found out she had Alzheimer’s, she resolved that before the disease stole her mind, she would kill herself, writes The New York Times. The question was, when? And how? Ethicists to advise on ‘compassionate use’
Johnson & Johnson will become the first pharmaceutical company to formally seek advice from outside medical ethicists on 'compassionate use' requests, in which desperate patients ask drug makers to let them take an experimental medication.Questions over CNN's journalist-surgeon
Ethical questions have been raised after a CNN crew covering the Nepalese earthquake filmed its chief medical correspondent, Dr Sanjay Gupta, perform emergency brain surgery on an eight-year-old girl using a saw and resuscitate a woman mid-air on a helicopter, using a cardiac thump.Death in the West: Ebola’s ‘silver lining’
Writing in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases a researcher from the University of Kansas, A. Townsend Peterson, points out that scientific and pharmaceutical interest in West Nile virus only took off after it appeared in the US in 1999. Something similar is happening with Ebola.VOICE failure opens Africa trials debate
The surprising failure of a large clinical trial of HIV-prevention methods – known by the acronym VOICE, (Vaginal and Oral Interventions to Control the Epidemic) – has opened an ethical debate about how to run such studies in poor countries and changed the design of some that are underway, reports The New York Times.'Three parent' IVF and the older woman
The doctor who pioneered the 'three parent' IVF embryo technique is pushing for it to be used for infertility in older women, raising hopes for millions. But its use beyond those suffering from mitochondrial diseases will provoke an ethical storm.