Month: December 2012

The State of Public Health Law: Post I, “Who Am I? Why am I Here?”

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By Scott Burris

Early in January, Lindsay Wiley and the Network for Public Health Law will convene a group of health law professors and (and a few colleagues from public health law practice) in Washington.  They will be spending a couple of days advancing a conversation about how academic health lawyers can make a bigger contribution to the cause of improving the level and distribution of health in the United States.  The conversation will pick up where a smaller group, organized by Wendy Parmet and Leo Beletsky, left off last Summer. You can read more about that meeting here.

The impetus for these meetings has been a sense that there is a well-organized and well-funded legal effort to blunt key initiatives in public health – and that it seems to be winning.  And that “our side” is not putting up much of a fight. Whether it is the creeping First Amendment or the shrinking Commerce Clause – or just the battle for public hearts and minds – many of us law professors shared the feeling that we needed to rethink our game, not just in the short term, but for the long haul.

The discussion in January will be addressing three questions essential to that rethink: (1) where are we now? (2) where would we like to be in 20 or 30 years? and (3) what will we have to do to get there?  In advance of the meeting, we are thinking about these questions, and I have taken on the task of offering some thoughts on question 1, in the form of a series of blog posts over the next three weeks.  These will be personal essays, describing my own perhaps confused thoughts. I consign them to ablog as much for future deniablilty as present dissemination. I’ll be happy to have comments.

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BU Law Conference on New Legal Challenges to Global Tobacco Control, Jan. 25, 2013

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Boston is a great city for health policy. On Jan. 25, BU Law hosts a conference on New Legal Challenges to Global Tobacco Control. Just a month later, Harvard hosts its own conference on the Global Governance of Tobacco (details here).

The BU Law conference  (announcement here; detailed schedule here) will focus on challenges rooted in constitutional law (First Amendment litigation in the US attacking FDA-required graphic images on tobacco packs); trade mark law (plain packaging in Australia); and global trade and investment treaties such as the Hong Kong-Australia Bilateral Investment Treaty and the WTO Agreements.  Speakers include some of the world’s leading public health experts on this topic:

  • Matthew Allen, Allen + Clarke Policy and Regulatory Specialists
  • Micah Berman, New England School of Law
  • Scott Burris, Temple University Beasley School of Law
  • Julien Chaisse, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
  • Richard Daynard, Northeastern University School of Law
  • Samantha Graff, NPLAN
  • Jane Kelsey, University of Auckland Faculty of Law
  • Lara Khoury, McGill University Faculty of Law
  • Mark Levin, University of Hawai’i at Manoa William S. Richardson School of Law
  • Jonathan Liberman, Cancer Council Victoria
  • Benn McGrady, Georgetown University Law Center
  • Ted Mermin, Public Good Law Center
  • Kevin Outterson, BU School of Law
  • Robert Stumberg, Georgetown University Law Center
  • Allyn Taylor, Georgetown University
  • Tania Voon, University of Melbourne Law School
  • George Annas, BU School of Law and BU School of Public Health
  • Leonard Glantz, BU School of Law and BU School of Public Health
  • Wendy Mariner, BU School of Law and BU School of Public Health
  • Alexandra Roberts, BU School of Law
  • Keynote Speaker: Dr. Michael Siegel, BU School of Public Health

The conference is open to everyone; see the schedule for details. The conference papers will be published in the American Journal of Law & Medicine.

The Newtown Tragedy: Today’s Need for Common-Sense Rhetoric and Regulation

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I grew up in a family of gun hobbyists.  One of my older brother’s most treasured Christmas presents from childhood is a rifle that was used in WWII; my dad had a collection of several dozen handguns, shotguns, and rifles, including a semi-automatic AR-15 “assault rifle” and a pearl-plated revolver and holster that he bought with a “Sheriff” badge just for fun; my younger brother is an ex-Marine. Throughout childhood, I spent every weekend of hunting season (and many summer weekends besides) on a West Texas ranch, shooting dove, quail, ducks, and exploding targets attached to grapefruits and ice blocks. And when I went to babysit my niece and nephew for a week in Austin, my brother’s first task was to show me where all of the house’s handguns were kept and how to open the safes he kept them in.

I don’t own a gun myself, and I don’t have any plans to get one. But I understand the utility of guns for both recreation and defense. Of course, as a scholar of health law and constitutional law, I also understand how complex the questions are that guns present for public health and individual liberty. But, as usual, my sense is that there is an obviously correct approach to those complex questions: an approach that seeks balance and optimization. A ban isn’t the right answer, from a policy or constitutional perspective, but in light of the very real dangers that guns present, neither is a strong Second Amendment bar to regulation. Of course, this view represents the current state of the law in both legislation and Supreme Court precedent; the balanced view is inconsistent only with the debate’s heated rhetoric. Here are a few thoughts:

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End of life, language, and the press

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By Cristiane Avancini Alves

In my previous post, I mentioned that Brazil does not have a specific law about advance directives. Nevertheless, a recent Resolution of the Federal Board of Medicine addresses this subject. It indicates that so-called “advance directives of will” are the set of desires, previously and expressly manifested by the patient, about the treatment he wants (or does not want) to receive when he is unable to express his will in a free and autonomous manner. Two points must be highlighted: the physician will not follow any patient’s directive that could violate the Medical Ethical Code, and the patient’s wish will overrule the intervention of his family regarding his decision.

The Resolution clearly expresses that “advance directives of will” mean what the phrase itself indicates: a direction, not a closed document that cannot be modified or that must be blindly followed. Time is significant in this context. For example, rapid biomedical development and the new possibility of cure can change the patient’s treatment course, regardless of a prior directive. Besides that, our personal believes about life and death can also change. Unfortunately, these elements have been misrepresented by the media. One of the most important Brazilian magazines dedicated a special report to the subject, but the headline was: “I decide my end”. No. That’s not what the Resolution affirms. The report continues by saying that the expression “advance directives of will” is a “pompous” name for “vital testament”. No. The title is not pompous, but rather accurate – reflecting simply that the document is a previous direction made by the patient. Moreover, advance directives of will cannot be related to testament, since the directive’s effects will occur during life, not after it – as it is for the legal meaning for testament.

Overall, the issues that came up here are indicative of broader issues related to how the media and public understand their rights, and the importance of word choice and clarity to that understanding.

Gun Violence: Lessons Learned from Car Crashes

Temple University Center for Public Health Law Research 1 Comment

By Scott Burris, JD

“I have an absolute right to drive any vehicle I want, on any road, at any time, at any speed, and under any conditions.”

That’s an argument few people would take seriously. And few people would take seriously the argument that we should ban or substantially limit automobile use, despite the fact that America suffers more than 30,000 motor vehicle deaths every year.

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Dissertation Grants for Public Health Law Research

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The Public Health Law Research program’s Strategic and Targeted Research Program funds research to fill critical gaps in the public health law evidence base. As part of this effort, PHLR is offering dissertation grants to train doctoral students in public health law research methods, including the development of legal datasets. PHLR invites current PhD students in accredited doctoral degree programs to apply.

Dissertation grants will be awarded for up to $20,000 each for 12 months maximum, and they include qualitative or quantitative studies of the health effects of specific laws or regulations and/or related underlying mechanisms of effect, and mapping studies that create a multi-jurisdictional dataset of laws suitable for quantitative research.

Up to $100,000 will be available under this program. Learn more about the call for proposals and how to apply: https://phlr.org/strp

We Need to Treat Violence as Public Health Issue

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By Art Caplan (cross-posted from his Vitals column on NBCNews)

The mass murder of 20 children and six adults Friday in Newtown, Conn., has provoked yet another round of recrimination, finger pointing and breast-beating. Was the shooter mentally deranged? If there was more gun control, would this have happened? Did violent video games play any role? What we fervently want as we continue to reel from a story whose misery seems to know no bounds is to find a clear cause – a reason why this happened – so that we can fix it.

We hope to see something in all the stories, analyses, commentaries, Facebook postings and Twitter speculation that gives us the reason behind what happened and thus a guarantee that if we understand and act on it then no 6 year old or her parent need to worry ever again what might happen at their school. We hope that no college, hospital or mall will ever again have a reason to practice drills for “shooters” and no play or movie-goer grow anxious over who has snuck into the theater with evil intent.

But, there is no simple answer. We have ourselves to blame for where we find ourselves in terms of mass shootings. Our culture is too far down the road of tolerating and even extolling violence. We do so in our popular entertainment, we permit the mass marketing of violence to young kids, and we thrill to it in too many of our sports. A lot of people make a lot of money selling violence. I doubt that will change.

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Conference: The Governance of Tobacco in the 21st Century, February 26-27

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The Harvard Global Health Institute will be co-hosting a conference on The Governance of Tobacco in the 21st Century: Strengthening National and International Policy for Global Health and Development at Harvard on February 26-27, 2013.  The conference program is available here, and additional information can be found here. Space is limited.  Please register by January 10.

For further information, contact Monique Bertic mbertic@hsph.harvard.edu

2012 Global Congress on Intellectual Property and the Public Interest

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By Adriana Benedict

The 2012 Global Congress on Intellectual Property and the Public Interest has just come to a close in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.  The conference brought together global leaders in intellectual property-related fields like access to medicines, access to knowledge, internet freedom, innovation and development, and open educational resources.  I was invited to participate in the various sessions concerning access to medicines, which focused on two sides of this global health challenge.

The first part of the access discussions focused on best practices and threats in the use of TRIPS flexibilities in developing countries.  Participants emphasized the need to look beyond the usual focus on compulsory licenses to set new priorities for understanding and leveraging less-developed flexibilities such as patentability criteria, patent opposition mechanisms and parallel importation.  An important overarching theme in these discussions was reframing flexibilities as rights, as they carry the same legal status as the intellectual property rights which make them necessary.

The other side of the discussions focused on innovation and research and development (R&D) for the developing world, primarily through recent advances by the WHO CEWG report in promoting a binding convention in this realm.  At the forefront of these proposals is the notion that incentives for innovation should be de-linked from product prices in order to address the needs of the developing world.  Participants emphasized that, moving forward, advocates should be careful to ensure that public and institutional debates on alternative R&D models do not narrow their focus from neglected populations to neglected diseases.

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Is Health Law the Problem Underlying the Physician Shortage?

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By Christopher Robertson

This week, the New York Times Sunday Review has an editorial arguing that the shortage of primary care physicians could be reduced if we drew more heavily upon other professions, including pharmacists and nurse practitioners, who may be able to provide care more efficiently.  The Affordable Care Act’s efforts to increase insurance coverage and eliminate cost-sharing for preventative care, will only exacerbate the shortage of primary care physicians.  More to the point, the editorial alleges that various state and federal laws create barriers to the sort of integration of healthcare professionals to address the shortage.

Those “scope of practice” laws were enacted to either protect consumers from incompetent healthcare or protect physicians from competition in the healthcare marketplace, or likely some mixture of both.  We know where mainstream physicians stand anyway.  In the words of the American Medical Association’s own newsletter,  “physicians [have] fought a blitz of scope-of-practice expansions by other health professionals on legislative, legal and regulatory fronts.”

The shortage of physicians is also a product of the number of young doctors that our medical schools are producing.  Although several new schools have launched in recent years, others are have actually shrunk due to budget cuts.