My Slate Article on the Importance of Replicating Science

By Michelle Meyer

I have a long article in Slate (with Chris Chabris) on the importance of replicating science. We use a recent (and especially bitter) dispute over the failure to replicate a social psychology experiment as an occasion for discussing several things of much broader import, including:

  • The facts that replication, despite being a cornerstone of the scientific method, is rarely practiced (and even less frequently published) not only in psychology but across science, and that when such studies are conducted, they frequently fail to replicate the original findings (let this be a warning to those of you who, like me, cite empirical literature in your scholarship);
  • Why replications are so rarely conducted and published, relative to their importance (tl;dr: it’s the incentives, stupid);
  • Why it’s critical that this aspect of the academic research culture change (because academic science doesn’t only affect academic scientists; the rest of us have a stake in science, too, including those who fund it, those who help researchers produce it (i.e., human subjects), those who consume and build on it (other scholars and policy-makers), and all of us who are subject to myriad laws and policies informed by it); and
  • Some better and worse ways of facilitating that cultural change (among other things, we disagree with Daniel Kahneman’s most recent proposal for conducting replications).

The Fight Against Antimicrobial Resistance: Important recent publications

By Timo Minssen

One of my previous blogs discussed the growing threat of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). I concluded that antimicrobial resistance is a growing and complex threat involving multifaceted legal, socio-economic and scientific aspects. This requires sustained and coordinated action on both global and local levels.

A recent medical review on drug resistant tuberculosis supports these findings and provides further fodder to the debate. In their study, which was published in April 2014 in The Lancet – Respiratory Medicine, the authors analyzed the epidemiology, pathogenesis, diagnosis, management, implications for health-care workers, and ethical and medico-legal aspects of extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis and other resistant strains. In particular, the authors discussed the increasing threat of functionally untreatable tuberculosis, and the problems that it creates for public health and clinical practice. The paper concludes that the growth of highly resistant strains of tuberculosis make the development of new drugs and rapid diagnostics for tuberculosis—and increased funding to strengthen global control efforts, research, and advocacy—even more pressing.

This was also recognized in the recent WHO’s Global Surveillance Report on AMR, which was published this April. It is the first WHO report that studied the problem of AMR on a global level. Noting that resistance is occurring across many different infectious agents, the report concentrates on antibiotic resistance in seven different bacteria responsible for common, serious diseases such as bloodstream infections (sepsis), diarrhoea, pneumonia, urinary tract infections and gonorrhoea. The results demonstrate a wide-spread growth of resistance to antibiotics, especially “last resort” antibiotics. In particular the report reveals that this serious threat is no longer a mere forecast for the future. AMR is a contemporary problem in every region of the world and has the potential to affect anyone, of any age, in any country. Consequently the WHO report concludes that antibiotic resistance is now a major threat to public health that needs to be tackled on a global level.

Read More

Weight Status: When Ignorance May Not Be Bliss

By Deborah Cho

A recent data brief summarizing a national survey spanning from 2005-2012 on the perception of weight status in U.S. children and adolescents highlights one major finding — many children and adolescents who are overweight or obese don’t know it.  Key findings were that about 81% of overweight (defined as having age- and sex-specific BMI greater than or equal to the 85th and less than the 95th percentile of the 2000 CDC growth chart) boys and 71% of overweight girls believe they are about the right weight.  Additionally, nearly 48% of obese (defined as having age- and sex-specific BMI greater than or equal to the 95th percentile of the 2000 CDC growth chart) boys and 36% of obese girls consider themselves to be about the right weight.  

As an article on the NPR blog noted, “Kids can be cruel, especially about weight. So you might think overweight or obese children know all too well that they’re heavy.”  But it seems that this is not the case, at least according to the survey.  Furthermore, not only do overweight or obese children generally seem to be unaware of their weight status, but the misperception rate appears to be higher in those children and adolescents whose families have a lower income-to-poverty ratio.  Non-Hispanic black and Mexican American children and adolescents were also found to have higher rates of misperception than Non-Hispanic white children and adolescents.

Read More

Serious Risks from New Prescription Drugs

by Donald W. Light

Based on https://www.ethics.harvard.edu/lab/blog/436-new-prescription-drugs-a-major-health-risk

Few people know that new prescription drugs have a 1 in 5 chance of causing serious reactions after they have been approved. That is why expert physicians recommend not taking new drugs for at least five years unless patients have first tried better-established options and need to. Faster reviews advocated by the industry-funded public regulators increase the risk of serious harm to 1 in 3. Yet most drugs they approve are found to have few offsetting clinical advantages over existing ones.

Systematic reviews of hospital charts by expert teams have found that even properly prescribed drugs (aside from misprescribing, overdosing, or self-prescribing) cause about 1.9 million hospitalizations a year. Another 840,000 hospitalized patients given drugs have serious adverse reactions for a total of 2.74 million. Further, the expert teams attributed as many deaths to the drugs as people who die from stroke. A policy review done at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University concluded that prescription drugs are tied with stroke as the 4th leading cause of death in the United States. The European Commission estimates that adverse reactions from prescription drugs cause 200,000 deaths; so together, about 328,000 patients in the US and Europe die from prescription drugs each year. The FDA does not acknowledge these facts and instead gathers a small fraction of the cases.

Perhaps this is “the price of progress”? For example, about 170 million Americans take prescription drugs, and many benefit from them. For some, drugs keep them alive. If we suppose they all benefit, then 2.7 million people have a severe reactions, it’s only about 1.5 percent – the price of progress?

However, independent reviews over the past 35 years have found that only 11-15 percent of newly approved drugs have significant clinical advantages over existing, better-known drugs. While these contribute to the large medicine chest of effective drugs developed over the decades, the 85-89 percent with little or no clinical advantage flood the market. Of the additional $70 billion spent on drugs since 2000 in the U.S. (and another $70 billion abroad), about four-fifths has been spent on purchasing these minor new variations rather than on the really innovative drugs.

In a recent decade, independent reviewers concluded that only 8 percent of 946 new products were clinically superior, down from 11-15 percent in previous decades. (See Figure) Only 2 were breakthroughs and another 13 represented a real therapeutic advance.

Read More

MS Admitting Privilege Law Struck Down by 5th Circuit

Ed Note: Guest post by Jonathan F. Will

On July 29, 2014 a panel of the 5th Circuit struck down a Mississippi statute that would have effectively closed the only remaining abortion clinic in the state. Just four months ago a different panel of the 5th Circuit upheld a nearly identical statute enacted in Texas. Both statutes require physicians performing abortions to have admitting privileges in local hospitals.

The differing results are unremarkable because both the purpose and effects prongs of Casey’s undue burden analysis are necessarily fact driven. But there are some open questions worth highlighting from the decisions. The Mississippi law raises a matter of first impression. Namely, of what relevance is it, if any, that Mississippi women would have to cross state lines to obtain an abortion if the law was upheld? After all, even if the last abortion clinic closed, Mississippi women would have a shorter distance to travel to obtain such services than some Texas women now have because of the other 5th Circuit decision.

In striking down the Mississippi law, the 5th Circuit cited an Equal Protection case from the 1930s involving racial discrimination, and suggested (at least in part) that Mississippi cannot “lean on its sovereign neighbors to provide protection of its citizens’ federal constitutional rights.” The idea being that if a state cannot rely on a sister state to provide education for minorities, a state likewise should not be permitted to rely on a sister state to provide abortion services. Regardless of my feelings about the outcome of the case, I have to agree with the dissenting opinion of Judge Garza that this analogy doesn’t work very well.

Read More

bioIP Junior Faculty Workshop: Call for Abstracts by Oct. 1

Call for Abstracts: 2015 bioIP Faculty Workshop

The American Society for Law, Medicine & Ethics (ASLME) is pleased to announce the first annual bioIP Faculty Workshop on May 7, 2015 at Boston University School of Law.

The Workshop will offer a unique opportunity for three junior scholars (in their first decade of teaching) to present their work in progress for in-depth critique and commentary by respected senior scholars in the field.

Topics for the workshop are at the intersection of biotechnology/life sciences/FDA and IP (hence, bioip), broadly defined. A Review Committee will select papers for the Workshop in a blind process. Papers should present an original thesis and contribute to scholarly literature. The Workshop will not review published work.

Scholars with less than ten years of teaching experience interested in having their papers reviewed should submit an abstract (up to 750 words) of the proposed paper (without identifying details) along with a c.v. to Ted Hutchinson, Executive Director of the ASMLE at thutchinson@aslme.org by Oct 1, 2014. Selected abstracts will be announced later in Fall 2014 with the full draft papers due by April 1, 2015. The organizers will cover reasonable travel and lodging expenses. VAPs and Fellows are eligible for the Workshop.

The Workshop Committee consists of faculty from: The Boston University School of Law; Georgia State University College of Law; Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law; and the Loyola University Chicago School of Law.

For questions, please email Kevin Outterson, mko@bu.edu.

Good news for many South African HIV patients—with a big glitch

On Wednesday, South African Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi announced that, as of January 2015, HIV-positive patients in the country would start receiving free antiretroviral treatment once their CD4 count fell below 500, instead of current threshold of less than 350. Some patient groups would start receiving antiretrovirals immediately upon being diagnosed with HIV infection, regardless of their clinical stage.

Last month, Till Bärnighausen, Dan Wikler and I predicted in PLoS Medicine that sub-Saharan nations would move in the direction that South Africa is now moving, and pointed out a big complication. This policy change might make several gigantic trials of so-called treatment-as-prevention in sub-Saharan Africa impossible to complete successfully. As we explained, these trials remain important for assessing the potential of treatment-as-prevention to curb the spread of HIV in general populations (with many different relationship types and different levels of care delivery and support).

In treatment-as-prevention, antiretrovirals are offered to patients immediately upon their diagnosis with HIV. The hope is that very early treatment would be better for these patients and prevent them from infecting others. We also offered some ways out of this mess, but they involve untraditional approaches to research conduct and to policy. Our piece was featured in the June issue of UNAIDS’ HIV This Month.

The D.C. Circuit Got it Wrong. Congressional Intent on Exchange Subsidies Is Clear, If You Know Where to Look

By Robert I. Field

Why would Congress have limited Affordable Care Act subsidies to residents of only some states – those that establish their own insurance exchanges? The law authorizes credits for the purchase of insurance “through an Exchange established by the State under section 1311.” The D.C. Circuit found that this wording excludes federally established exchanges and that Congress might have intended this to induce states to establish their own exchanges rather than letting the federal government take over.

But the Court acknowledged that there is no evidence of such intent in the legislative history. And such a purpose would conflict with the ACA’s overall goal of extending health insurance access to all Americans.

With no legislative history as a guide, is there another plausible explanation of Congressional intent? Is the best answer to the D.C. Circuit’s opinion that the phrase was a drafting error, as the dissent seems to imply? Why else would it have found its way into the law?

Inartful though it may be, the wording can be seen to serve a different purpose that is consistent with the rest of the ACA. It can be understood not as a way to distinguish exchanges established by a state from those established by the federal government but to distinguish those established publicly from those created privately.

Read More

The Problematic Jurisprudence of Halbig v. Burwell

By Leslie Francis

Like the recent Supreme Court decision in Hobby Lobby, the D.C. Circuit’s ruling earlier this week in Halbig v. Burwell is being hailed by conservatives and bemoaned by liberals as a death knell for Obamacare.  Unlike the decision in Hobby Lobby, however the D.C. Circuit’s ruling is not the end of the matter, and many liberals are finding hope in the ruling of the 4th Circuit the same day, the probability of an en banc hearing in the D.C. Circuit, and the ultimate possibility of a favorable Supreme Court decision.  In an earlier post in HealthLawProf, I decided to take seriously the possibility of damage control from a limited reading of Hobby Lobby.  It is pretty much universally agreed—and I believe correctly—that it is not possible to do similar damage control by giving a limited reading to Halbig v. Burwell.  If the ruling stands, that tax subsidies are not available to people purchasing coverage through the exchanges in the states that are letting the federal government do the work, many important other provisions of the ACA will be untenable, including the penalties for large employers not offering insurance whose employees receive subsidies and likely the individual mandate itself.  But I think it is possible to undermine Halbig in a way not generally recognized by the liberal critics who argue (correctly) that the statutory provision at issue is ambiguous:  argue that the jurisprudence of the majority opinion in Halbig is internally inconsistent.  Here’s how. Read More