Month: August 2016

NIH Announces Plans for new Rules for Funding Chimera Research (Human-Animal Mixtures)

I. Glenn Cohen Leave a comment

As reported by Science, today the NIH announced plans to lift a preemptive year long moratorium on funding chimera research – that which mixes human and animal cells, often at the embryonic stage.

Here is a snippet from the Science article about the new proposed NIH process:

According to two notices released today, NIH is proposing to replace the moratorium with a new agency review process for certain chimera experiments. One type involves adding human stem cells to nonhuman vertebrate embryos through the gastrulation stage, when an embryo develops three distinct layers of cells that then give rise to different tissues and organs. The other category is studies that introduce human cells into the brains of postgastrulation mammals (except rodent studies, which won’t need extra review).

These proposed studies will go to an internal NIH steering committee of scientists, ethicists, and animal welfare experts that will consider factors such as the type of human cells, where they may wind up in the animal, and how the cells might change the animal’s behavior or appearance. The committee’s conclusions will then help NIH’s institutes decide whether to fund projects that have passed scientific peer review.

The devil will, of course, be in the details. It will be interesting to see how much NIH takes a more categorical approach as opposed to more case-by-case rule making like in the Institutional Review Board or ESCRO setting. Read More

Child safeguarding: the National Health Service (NHS) can do much better

John Tingle Leave a comment

By John Tingle

Our children are our future and we need to look after them well. There is however a lot of evidence to suggest that we are failing our children in a number of key health areas. UNICEF in a report put the UK in 16th position – below Slovenia, the Czech Republic and Portugal – in a league table of child well-being in the world’s richest countries. The report considers five dimensions of children’s lives – material well-being, health and safety, education, behaviours and risks, and housing and environment – as well as children’s subjective well-being.

There are a number of health and other child well-being challenges for the UK to meet. The UNICEF report provides some useful context from which to view the recently published Care Quality Commission (CQC) report on the arrangements for child safeguarding and healthcare for looked after children in England.The CQC is the independent regulator of health and social care in England.Whilst the report does contain some positive findings, when read as a whole, these seem subsumed by the large number of negative findings, some of which are very worrying. Read More

CDC’s Matthew Penn Plus Ross Silverman on ‘The Week in Health Law’ Podcast

Nicolas P. Terry Leave a comment

By Nicolas Terry and Frank Pasquale

Listen here!

twihl 5x5Our guests this week are Matthew Penn, Director of the Public Health Law Program within CDC’s Office for State, Tribal, Local and Territorial Support, and Ross Silverman from Indiana University. Matthew leads a team of public health advisors and analysts in supporting practitioners and policy makers at the state, tribal, local, and territorial levels through the development of practical, law-centered tools and legal preparedness to address public health priorities. Ross is Professor of Health Policy and Management at the Indiana University Richard M. Fairbanks School of Public Health at IUPUI, and holds a secondary appointment as Professor of Public Health Law at the Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law. Ross serves numerous leadership positions in the field of public health law, including as a mentor in the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation/Georgia State University Future of Public Health Law Education: Faculty Fellowship Program, as a member of the American Public Health Association Action Board, and as past chair of the American Public Health Association Law Section.

Some topics discussed by the guests include a Transdisciplinary Approach to Public Health Law: The Emerging Practice of Legal Epidemiology, a Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) (State and Territorial Ebola Screening, Monitoring, and Movement Policy Statements — United States, August 31, 2015), and The Electronic Health Records Toolkit: Improving Your Access to Electronic Health Records During Outbreaks of Healthcare-associated Infections.In the lightning round, Frank and Nic discussed the growing cost of catastrophic coverage in Medicare Part D, and how a Procrustean health care system can fail the obese. They also covered the new hospital star ratings, developments in off-label promotion and corporate criminal liability, and disturbing new revelations about the manifest inadequacies of many narrow networks on the exchanges.

The Week in Health Law Podcast from Frank Pasquale and Nicolas Terry is a commuting-length discussion about some of the more thorny issues in Health Law & Policy. Subscribe at iTunes, listen at Stitcher Radio, Tunein and Podbean, or search for The Week in Health Law in your favorite podcast app. Show notes and more are at TWIHL.com. If you have comments, an idea for a show or a topic to discuss you can find us on twitter @nicolasterry @FrankPasquale @WeekInHealthLaw