further details on how not to procure organs

The LA Times has a follow-up on the organ procurement/transplant case that Ina's Sporula mentioned a few days back. Some intrepid soul at the paper decided to request the originally referred to report via the Freedom of Information Act, and received a 76-page document from federal investigators that reads like a litany of 101 things to not do when procuring organs for transplant.

As more comes out about this case, it's likely that the transplant surgeon will be the one made an example of, the over-zealous doctor that pushed too far. It is, after all, a nightmare scenario I hear repeated as the basis for why so many people are not organ donors, even though they would want an organ transplant themselves if it were necessary. But what is so interesting, in a "if you can't be a good example you'll be a horrible warning" sort of way, is reading the summary of the full report in the LA Times and realizing how many medical personnel (nurses and doctors) were present in the room, uncomfortable with what was going on, and said nothing until days, days, later. This seems a much more systemic problem than one over-zealous surgeon, to something endemic within the culture of the hospital itself.
-Kelly Hills

Oh Yeah, Those Brains

Special prosecutor leads brain program inquiry, writes the (Portland) Maine Press Herald:

Maine Attorney General Steven Rowe has appointed a special prosecutor to direct the state's investigation of brain harvesting at the Medical Examiner's Office. The appointment of Assistant U.S. Attorney Richard Murphy follows disclosures that members of Rowe's department had connections to the now-suspended program. Ninety-nine brains were sent to a Maryland lab that studies mental illness between 1999 and 2003, and numerous ethics and oversight problems have since been discovered.

- Arthur Caplan

EPA Criteria for Pesticide Dangers are Unethical and Flawed

Flawed Pesticide Studies Using Human Subjects Could Result In Higher Allowable Exposures For Both Children And Adults, trumpets perhaps the most comprehensive review ever of a set of studies at the EPA, published in the American Journal of Public Health. The study:

found the studies flawed by conflict of interest, failure to meet ethical standards established by the Declaration of Helsinki, unacceptable informed consent procedures, inadequate statistical power and inappropriate test methods and end points.

Canadian Research Ethics ...

It could not get much worse at the University of British Columbia, where ethics review of research experiments borders on non-existent and the internal oversight seems to have been utterly ignored. The only question is how widespread the research ethics problems are across Canada. The Scientist suggests that the problem is national.