Tag: Public Health Law Research

National Conference on HIV Criminalization

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By Sterling Johnson, JD

Grinnell College in Iowa will host the first National Conference on HIV Criminalization next week, June 2-5 on its campus.

One of the stated goals of the conference will be to discuss the recent legislative changes in Iowa and how to apply the lessons to other states with laws that apply specifically to people with HIV.

Currently, 43 states criminalize actions by HIV-positive individuals. Check out our map at LawAtlas.org for more details.

US states with HIV criminalization laws

In 2009, Iowa became the center of this battle when Nick Rhoades, who is HIV-positive, had a one-time sexual encounter with another man, Adam Plendl. Three months after, Mr. Rhoades was arrested on suspicion of engaging in intimate contact without disclosing his HIV-positive status. At the time of the sexual encounter, he used a condom, had an undetectable viral load and his sexual partner did not contract HIV; however, Nick Rhoades was sentenced to 25 years in prison and classified as a sex offender. The case is now is now on appeal and being argued by Lambda Legal. The Iowa court of Appeals affirmed the conviction and the case is now under review by the Iowa Supreme Court. Mr. Rhoades’s case led to community organizers lobbying to reform the HIV criminalization law in Iowa. Read More

Research Round-Up: New Publications from the PHLR SciVal Experts Community

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In honor of last week’s National Public Health Week, we have a lot of fresh, new PHLR. The latest crop of papers from public health law researchers touch on a number of important points and issues including transportation safety, implementation, tobacco control, and media presentation of public health law. Check out Scott Burris’s brief summaries after the jump!

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New regulatory pathways and incentives for sustainable antibiotics: Recent European & US Initiatives

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By Timo Minssen

Please find attached a ppt presentation on “New regulatory pathways and incentives for sustainable antibiotics: Recent European & US Initiatives” given on March 7, 2014 at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.  The presentation was followed by a discussion moderated by US patent attorney Melissa Hunter-Ensor, Partner at Saul Ewing, Boston.

I started out by emphasizing increasing problems of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) on a global level, providing new statistics and facts. This was followed by a discussion of main reasons for these alarming developments, such as inappropriate use in agriculture and medicine, insufficient precautions, lack of education, climate change, travel behavior, insufficient collaboration and funding of R&D, scientific complexities, and the problem that incentives provided by the traditional innovation system model often fail in the case of antibiotics.

Next the presentation focused on a variety of solution models that could be discussed to fight AMR. These include both conservational and preventive approaches comprising use limitations, increased public awareness, and better hygiene, but also reactive push & pull strategies, such as increased investments, new collaborative models for R&D in antibiotics, prizes, “sui generis” IP-related incentives, regulatory responses and new pathways for approval.

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Happy Public Health Week: “We’re Good Enough, We’re Smart Enough, and Doggone It, People Like Us”

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By Scott Burris

We may be living in a golden age of group-think. A weekly reminder is poor Paul Krugman railing against the apparently universal belief in America and Europe that we’ve got to cut budgets right now or disaster will strike. He calls this a Zombie idea, a false claim that has been falsified with plenty of stakes in the heart, silver bullets and blows to the head, but will not stay in the grave.

Closer to home for us in public health is the claim that Americans don’t like government rules regulating their behavior and meddling with their preferences.  Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler have delivered some solid blows to the idea that paternalism typically messes with solid preferences. As we celebrate Public Health Week, I want to highlight two recent papers that show that Americans, like the children in Mary Poppins, actually like their nannies, who do some pretty great things.

Public Health Law Research has recently posted the manuscript of a paper that Evan Anderson and I have prepared for the Annual Review of Law and Social Science. The paper describes the dramatic rise of law as a tool of public health since the 1960s in five major domains: traffic safety, gun violence, tobacco use, reproductive health and obesity.  These topical stories illustrate both law’s effectiveness and limitations as a public health tool. They also establish its popularity by the most apt of metrics – the willingness of legislators to enact it. The one picture worth a thousand words, below, depicts the rapid adoption of a variety of interventions by state legislatures. (By the way, the five examples also show that public health law research can and does influence the development and refinement of legal interventions over time.)

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Birth Control for Men?

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By Dov Fox

We’re not talking vasectomies or condoms.

Medical Daily reports that the NIH has awarded a $4.7 million grant to come up with a “Pill” for men. Most previous attempts to develop such contraceptives used testosterone to reduce the number of sperm men produce. This one takes aim at its mobility instead, using a non-hormonal compound that promises fewer side effects, according to scientists. Clinical testing into its safety and efficacy, assuming the FDA grants permission, would take at least five to ten years before the agency could consider approving the drug for use.

The availability of male birth control would make it possible for men and women to share responsibility for contraception. Today, women alone shoulder the considerable physical and other burdens that come with the Pill. And only women enjoy the security that control of its use affords over the likelihood of unwanted pregnancy. Tomorrow, we could even things out a bit. That’d surely be a development worth embracing. Or would it? Sharing responsibility for contraception means leaving it to men to take the necessary measures to prevent the reproductive consequences that in our society fall far more heavily on women.

We might suppose that some such men, who have less at stake than their female partners, would be less vigilant about birth control and forget to take the pill. There is also evidence to suggest that other men might use greater control over conception for abusive purposes. A 2010 study found that 15% percent of respondents women ages 16-29 who sought care in several Northern California family planning clinics reported that their male partners had damaged condoms or otherwise sabotaged their birth control.*

Would birth control for men be cause for celebration, or concern? Would it revolutionize sexual equality, or change little at all?

*This “pregnancy coercion,” as the researchers call it, differs in respect of the gestation, abortion rights, and sex-differentiated social expectations involved from the reverse-gender cases that Glenn Cohen has analyzed in which courts “have imposed legal parenthood [] on fathers deceived into believing that their partners could not conceive” or under circumstances in which “conception took place without meaningful consent.”

Flu Vaccine Mandates for Health Care Workers

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According to officials, the worst of this year’s devastating flu season should be over in most parts of the country. But in early January, the flu had hit 47 of 50 states. According to the CDC, a total of 78 influenza-associated pediatric deaths have been reported. Throughout this terrible flu season, there’s been much talk about vaccination mandates for health care workers.

States have started passing legislation regulating health care worker flu vaccination, and an increasing number of hospitals have started implementing policies in attempt to reach the Healthy People 2020 goal of having 90 percent of health care workers vaccinated. Only two-thirds of health care workers were vaccinated against the flu last year. This can leave patients at risk and hospitals short-staffed because of absenteeism.

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Reducing Gun Violence in America

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Typically, we would avoid such a shameless plug for our researchers — we’d be a little more subtle. But, we can’t help it this time. This book is the best $10 you’ll spend all year.

A little less than a month ago, Johns Hopkins University convened more than 20 of the world’s leading experts on gun violence and policy to summarize their research and recommend policy changes. This 282-page book features empirical research from the leading experts in the field covering the topics of mental health and gun violence, gun law enforcement, high-risk guns, international case studies of responses to gun violence, the Second Amendment, public opinion on gun policy, and concludes with a summary of the recommendations for reforms to Federal policies.

Chapter 3, “Preventing Gun Violence Involving People with Serious Mental Illness,” features research conducted by Jeffrey Swanson, PhD, and his team of researchers based at Duke University. The research presented was funded by PHLR and the National Science Foundation.

Seriously. Check it out.

PHLR Annual Meeting Post-Mortem

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This past week, PHLR hosted 150 researchers, lawyers, public health practitioners and others for our fourth annual meeting. With our theme for the conference in mind, “Driving Legal Innovation,” our attendees shared results of evaluations of laws and regulations, offered up suggestions for new ways to use law to improve health, and attacked head on the issues facing the United States and our public health.

While you wait for more multimedia content, here are a few highlight moments: Read More

Ohio Joins In

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By Hosea H. Harvey, JD, PhD

Last week, Ohio joined the vast majority of states that have enacted laws designed to reduce long-term health consequences for youth athletes who suffer concussions (technically, traumatic brain injuries or TBIs) in organized youth sports activities.  Based on my research for an upcoming article “Reducing Traumatic Brain Injuries in Youth Sports” (forthcoming, American Journal of Public Health), it appears that Ohio has followed the lead of most other states by adhering to a common framework and (at the same time) has substantially innovated with respect to certain key provisions of such laws.

Most youth sports TBI laws are organized around three broad risk-reduction methods: 1) educating parents, youth athletes, and/or coaches, 2) requiring the removal of youth athletes suspected of having concussions, and 3) providing criteria that a youth athlete must meet prior to returning to athletic competition. Each of these methods are, in part, derived from legislation crafted after a tragic football injury to Zachary Lystedt in Washington, leading the state to pass the nation’s first such law in April 2009. (You can read the law on LawAtlas™)  Since then, adherence to the “Lystedt framework” has been a common feature of state-level youth sports TBI laws. In this fast-paced legislative environment, unprecedented in scope, Ohio is relatively late to the game. Yet, by moving later, Ohio’s deliberate speed has resulted in legislation that relies on the Lystedt framework but also contains innovations of uncertain efficacy.

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Preventing Teen Crashes with Stickers

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By Scott Burris

Graduated Drivers’ License Laws have apparently been a major success in reducing crashes among novice drivers. (A couple of studies have suggested the laws might just be postponing crashes, but so far that hypothesis remains unproved, and the weight of expert opinion seems to be that the association is spurious.)  There has been a weak link in enforcement, though, which is that in the dark of night and flow of traffic, police officers can’t always spot an underage driver out past the curfew or chauffeuring too many passengers.

Enter the decal.  A number of European and Asian countries require new drivers to decorate their car with a special decal indicating probationary status. That way it is easy for police to detect possible GDL violations.

In 2010, New Jersey became the first state to require the decal, and this week a PHLR study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine found robust evidence of seriously positive impact.

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