End of the Year Take One

We'll keep updating this post as the stuff pours in, so scroll down during the next week or so if you are interested in year-end review stuff:

Art Caplan has closed out the year in bioethics on MSNBC, the last web news Op Ed column (CNN and ABC have both closed up shop in bioethics).

Betterhumans, the transhumanist blog, identifies this as its top story as the year, a review of the potential for a drug called rimonabant to prevent cravings for cigarettes and food.

All Sorts of NY Times Stuff: Autism, Clinical Trials, Tsunami

The NY Times reported this week that many with autism have essentially adopted the argument of those with Downs who make the claim that theirs is a different form of human life and experience, rather than a disability, syndrome or disease. Now they cover the absence of real evidence on what cures autism, if anything, and the meaning of that absence for patients and the health professions. Getting treatment for autism is increasingly difficult, because insurers do not want to pay, and the burden on siblings is more profound that has been realized. Each of these articles will be helpful for anyone dealing either with autism or with the more general issues in the ethics of just distribution of health care.

One piece on the Celebrex, Vioxx, Aleve problems and their implications for public perception of the FDA.

Are physicians boring? Like this needed an article.

NY Times covers medical relief efforts in the aftermath of the incredible tsunami devastation. This piece itemizes the hurdles that physicians and other health relief forces will face. Among the most significant distribution issues is one that involves the general inability of international and national groups in healthcare to work together or to do their own logistics:

The aim is to avoid much of the competition and lack of coordination that have hampered the response of governments and private organizations to earlier catastrophes, Robert Holden, a member of the command center team, said in a telephone interview. In responding to the tsunami in South and Southeast Asia, he said: "The biggest problem is ensuring that those who survived continue to survive and provide the materials they need. We must avoid creating a secondary disaster because we can't get the necessary materials through."

Denise Grady writes about the lives of five people enrolled in different clinical trials. This piece should be used by anyone teaching research ethics to clinicians.

What's Up Roundup

Ten myths about assisted suicide from Spiked Liberties.

Ethics of compulsory drug screening.

Amusing "please call our expert" release on Pfizer Celebrex heart risks, from Saint Louis University

Knight Ridder piece by April Lynch on hiding genetic testing results from insurance companies

Another PR piece fed to the media on an ethicist, this time Penn's Martha Farah and neuroethics.

What's Up Roundup

Not enough organs in Scotland, and fewer are going to be available.

More about how the world will end, or at least it will feel like that in Wisconsin, if the state doesn't kick up its stem cell spending.

Wisconsin should be more worried about New Jersey, whose new acting governor is going to be asking voters to approve borrowing "hundreds of millions of dollars" to fund embryonic stem cell research.New Jersey's last governor, in early retirement, is being eulogized all over the place for his role in advancing stem cell research there.

A new novel from Jodi Picoult examines purposeful birth for organ donation and Courtney Devores likes it. AJOB will have a review; anybody want to do it?

Seattle PI discusses moral surprise in the election.

Go figure that fewer people want hormone replacement therapy after a study showed that they might harm women. Who would have guessed?

I love this piece in OregonLive about the Seventh-day Adventists' role in Operation Whitecoat, the long-running biologic research program between 1954 and 1973. The courage of these who were exposed to all sorts of horrific germs is interesting. Moreno is quoted.

I love university fluff about professorial accomplishments, because it means that the university recognizes that it actually has a faculty. Here's a nice piece about Bob Levine's appointment to the CDC vaccine task force.

Speaking of university press, this short one by a Princeton undergrad looks at Peter Singers' class' visit to a NICU. Singer visits a NICU. What does he say in his ethics consults??

Leave it to an evangelical to coin a new bioethics term: the bioethics porkfest.

Votes & Values (Multiple Sources)

Just about enough time has passed for the Monday morning quarterback essays to come out in earnest about the election. Equally notable are the essays proclaiming victory. One of my favorite essays is Jeff Weiss' in the Dallas Morning News which analyzes the rhetoric of values in the election. The most read blog on the Internet, Daily Kos, summarizes his take on the most prevalent theories as to what the election means, and the discussion includes almost 400 responses many of which are from health policy analysts. Also around the blogs, Matthew Holt of Health Care Blog opines on winners and losers. The quite conservative San Francisco Chronicle discusses the role of celebrity endorsements, which really have reached an unprecedented pitch in this round of elections. Christian Science Monitor discusses the demonization of big pharma, which is interesting since the discussion of drug companies does not seem to have played a significant role in the election.

Around the World News

It is a huge day for bioethics news.

Interesting non-U.S. perspective on the positioning of Bush and Kerry on embryonic stem cell research and abortion, finds that there is great confusion and deception in both campaigns.

Jakarta Post announces a national bioethics body for Indonesia.

They must love George in the U.K., where he has just attacked their stem cell policy, reports The Times London.

LifeNews reports that the Dutch law extending euthanasia to children is being attacked in several ways in public policy forums.