Month: May 2014

See and Share Job and Fellowship Opportunities on the Petrie-Flom Website

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

pfc-web-logo

Looking for new opportunities in the fields of health law, policy, and bioethics? Look no further!

This spring, we’ve added a new opportunities section to the resources on the new Petrie-Flom website. This page features opportunities in health law and bioethics including jobs, fellowships, graduate programs, seminars, calls for abstracts and submissions—and more! These opportunities are updated in real time, full posts remain active on the website until their deadline passes, and past posts are visible in our opportunities archive.

If you have opportunities that you would like to share with the Petrie-Flom community via our website and/or our biweekly e-newsletter, please contact us at petrie-flom@law.harvard.edu.

DUE 6/3: Call for Abstracts: Emerging Issues and New Frontiers for FDA Regulation

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

            PFC_Logo_300x300                    FDLI_Logo_380

The Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School and the Food and Drug Law Institute are pleased to announce an upcoming collaborative academic symposium:

Emerging Issues and New Frontiers for FDA Regulation

Monday, October 20, 2014 

Washington, DC

We are currently seeking abstracts for academic presentations/papers on the following topics:  Read More

Wait Times in the News in Canada

mlawrence Leave a comment

At the same time that wait times at VA hospitals have been in the news here in the U.S., a recent report has put healthcare queues in the news in Canada.  Specifically, a recent report from the Fraser Institute (a research institute that I’ve seen described as “conservative” and “pro-free market“) concluded that 44,723 women in Canada died between 1993 and 2009 due to increased wait times–or 2.5% of all female deaths during that period.  One week of delay was equated with 3 extra deaths per 100,000.  That surprising result led to a good bit of coverage, which is how it came across my desk (thanks to a google news search).  (See here, here, and here.)  But I have to admit I am a little bit skeptical.

Read More

Technology and The Horrors of Child Pornography

Michele Goodwin Leave a comment

By Michele Goodwin

A recent spate of arrests in New York emphasizes the potentially dangerous connection between technology and sex crimes.  In a landmark police bust, authorities tracked down and arrested more than seventy people in the New York City area who were trading child pornography.  Among those arrested were a rabbi, police chief, nurse, architect, and nanny.  Police infiltrated chat rooms where traffickers made available images of children engaged in sex acts with each other and adults.

What is the role of technology in the arrests and distribution of these images?  While technology helped officers track down child pornography traffickers, the internet also facilitated the trading of those harmful, illegal images of children.  On line chat rooms and other social network spaces provide for the broad-spread, easy distribution of child pornography.

Importantly, the children whose images are trafficked are re-victimized each time their images are shared, bought, and sold.  The frequency at which this can occur is intensified over electronic media, opening a horrific floodgate as demonstrated in the New York arrests where thousands of obscene, pornographic images of children were collected from dozens of confiscated laptops. Clearly, solutions to this problem must necessarily emphasize examining technology’s  unwelcome dark side.

Boko Haram Kidnappings and the Victims’ Mental Health

Michele Goodwin Leave a comment

By Michele Goodwin

In mid-April, Boko Haram, an extremist organization operating in the northern region of Nigeria, kidnapped nearly 300 girls from their boarding school in Borno.  Kidnappers threatened thatNigeria_Boko_Haram_Kidnapping the girls would be sold to sex trafficking rings in neighboring countries, causing international alarm.   In the weeks since that mass kidnapping, world leaders have issued collective demands for the return of the girls–and placed pressure on Nigeria’s president, Goodluck Jonathan to take aggressive action to achieve the girls’ return.  Some pundits believe hope may be around the corner, because in the last two days, Boko Haram leaders claimed that they will release some of the girls to safe houses.  Yet, it remains unclear whether this will happen. Read More

SAVE THE DATE: 9/18/14, Post-Trial Access to Medicines: Responsibilities and Implementation

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

pills_genericvariety_slide

Please join us for a day-long conference at Harvard Law School on September 18, 2014, which will include presentations by leading experts and varied stakeholders as well as small group discussion and break out sessions that will work toward developing consensus in this difficult area.

Key questions include:

  • How should post-trial access be defined?
  • What type of interventions should be included in post-trial access obligations?
  • What are the responsibilities of various stakeholders?

More information, including the developing agenda, will be posted on the Petrie-Flom Center’s website as it becomes available.

Cosponsored by the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School and the Multi-Regional Clinical Trials Center at Harvard University.

PFC_Logo_300x300MRCT

Art Caplan on ‘Right to Try’ Law: More Cruel Than Compassionate

acaplan Leave a comment

Art Caplan has a new opinion piece up at NBC News on Colorado’s new “right to try” law, which “expands access to experimental medications, making it legal for the terminally ill to seek access to drugs that have not yet received FDA approval.” From the article:

Colorado has become the first state to enact a so-called “right to try” law that expands access to experimental medications, making it legal for the terminally ill to seek access to drugs that have not yet received FDA approval. Many others are considering doing the same thing.

Politicians know a surefire winning issue when they see one. Sounds like a great idea? The truth is, such laws are utterly inadequate for helping the dying and the desperate. They would better be described as “right to beg” laws — a right which, sadly, the terminally ill already have and already use in social media campaigns.

Read the full article.

How Medicine Learns About the Law

Nadia Sawicki 1 Comment

By Nadia N. Sawicki

Many medical providers learn about the law the way kids learn about sex – whispers with friends, internet message boards, and media depictions of the most dramatic and unrealistic kind. And while both medical schools and junior high schools offer some type of formal education, it is quite limited, especially as compared to the information these students collect through other, less reputable, sources. As a result, many medical providers go into practice with a dark cloud over their heads – the “scared straight” model of legal education, if you will.

We’ve heard a lot about the practice of defensive medicine – ordering more tests and procedures than are medically necessary in an effort to protect oneself from potential liability. But fear of liability manifests itself in other, less dramatic, ways as well – for example, in overly-restrictive interpretations of HIPAA requirements that make it difficult for patients and their care providers to access needed medical information. In reality, however, much of the fear of liability experienced by medical professionals is unfounded.

Read More

Doctors, Lethal Injection, and Firing Squads

I. Glenn Cohen 3 Comments

Yesterday JAMA published a new perspective I co-wrote with Bob Truog and Mark Rockoff  “Physicians, Medical Ethics, and Execution by Lethal Injection“. In that article we make the case that the recommendations coming out of the Oklahoma botched lethal injection executions to require physician involvement would force physicians into an untenable medical ethical position. We also argue that it supports a kind of kabuki theater of medicalization, where execution becomes normalized.

Now comes a news report of a Utah lawmaker pushing to give those set to be executed the option of firing squad which he views as more humane than lethal injection. Many people will no doubt recoil at this notion. But here is my intentionally provocative question (and this is on my behalf not my co-authors): If you are in favor of capital punishment, wouldn’t a single close range shot to the head as a form of execution be, in some ways, more defensible than lethal injection? If you recoil at the notion of this being a way of doing execution, have you perhaps fallen for the kabuki theater of medicalization? Why not choose a method of execution that is more honest about the gravity (and perhaps the horror) of what we are doing rather than present something as somewhere on a continuum with sedation?