Are We Ready for a ‘Morality Pill’?
[NYTimes]- Last October, 
in Foshan, China, a 2-year-old girl was run over by a van. The driver did not stop. Over the next seven minutes, more than a dozen people walked or bicycled past the injured child. A second truck ran over her. Eventually, a woman pulled her to the side, and her mother arrived. The child died in a hospital. The entire scene was captured on video and caused an uproar when it was shown by a television station and posted online. A similar event occurred in London in 2004, as have others, far from the lens of a video camera.
New Media, Old Messages: Themes in the History of Vaccine Hesitancy and Refusal
[Virtual Mentor] The current climate surrounding childhood vaccination in the United States is one of confusion and vitriol. Despite the well-documented achievements of vaccines and extensive efforts by the public health community to ensure their safety, vocal critics of vaccination proffer a growing list of theories that link vaccines to an array of medical conditions, most prominently autism. Others question the necessity of newer vaccines, seeing their arrivals not as triumphs of medical research but as overreaches by a profit-obsessed pharmaceutical industry and an accommodating, financially conflicted medical establishment.
In response to these charges, physicians, scientists, and government public health officials are routinely on the defensive, refuting allegations of unconfirmed risks, justifying the value of recommended vaccines, and striving to preserve public trust in vaccination overall. While national data suggest that a strong foundation of support for vaccination remains, regional clusters of unvaccinated children and increases in nonmedical exemptions from state school-entry vaccination requirements are causes for alarm among advocates of vaccines. Even more worrisome is research suggesting that the safety of vaccines is a growing concern among many parents [1].
Face up to fraud
[Nature] Many people in science would rather not talk about the problem of research misconduct, much less act on it. After all, who directly involved would benefit from a serious crackdown? Certainly not the institutions at which the misconduct takes place — they are nominally responsible, but can face legal repercussions, embarrassing headlines and a public-relations disaster if they expose cheating academics. It is much easier to shuffle miscreants out of the side door with vague references and a promise of silence, effectively pushing the problem somewhere else, and onto someone else.
So it is perhaps a sort of progress that the British Medical Journal and the international Committee on Publication Ethics were able to organize a meeting on the subject in London last week, gathering representatives from universities, funders, journals and lobby groups to discuss how the problem could be tackled in the United Kingdom (see Nature http://doi.org/hmx; 2012). The meeting broke little new ground, but its organizers do, at least, deserve credit for trying.
HEALTH CARE: Jobs Will Be Hard to Create
[National Journal] In an address that barely mentions health care, President Obama hits on the message heard repeatedly from the health care industry: If you want more jobs, don’t cut off federal funding.
Obama implores Congress not to “gut” investments in research, so American can maintain its spot as a world leader in medical innovation. That line will earn applause from the pharmaceutical and medical device industries, but it won’t be enough to deliver a health care economy that delivers a “fair shot” to everyone.
The president held out the continued possibility of saving health care costs with Medicare reform. “As I told the speaker this summer, I’m prepared to make more reforms that rein in the long term costs of Medicare and Medicaid, and strengthen Social Security, so long as those programs remain a guarantee of security for seniors,” Obama said. “But in return, we need to change our tax code so that people like me, and an awful lot of members of Congress, pay our fair share of taxes. Tax reform should follow the ‘Buffett Rule’: If you make more than $1 million a year, you should not pay less than 30 percent in taxes.”
Man with locked-in syndrome wants right to die
[MSNBC]Former rugby player Tony Nicklinson had a high-flying job as a corporate manager in Dubai, where he went skydiving and bridge-climbing in his free time.
Seven years ago, he suffered a paralyzing stroke. Today he can only move his head, cannot speak and needs constant care.
And he wants to die.
To try to ensure that whoever ends his life won’t be jailed, the 57-year-old Nicklinson recently asked Britain’s High Court to declare that any doctor who gives him a lethal injection with his consent won’t be charged with murder. This week, the court will hold its first hearing on the case.
Scientists Halt Bird Flu Research For 60 Days Amid Safety Concerns
[Kaiser] The head of the NIH National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which funded “two projects that created a highly pathogenic [H5N1] flu virus mutation, has welcomed a two-month moratorium on further research while defending the value and safety of the experiments,” the Financial Times reports. NIAID Director Anthony Fauci “told the FT it was ‘right to get off the unnecessary fast track’ of a debate ‘played out in sound bites,’ and instead hold a serious international debate to determine future publication and practice in the field,” according to the newspaper (Jack, 1/22). “In a letter published in the journals Nature and Science on Friday, 39 scientists defended the research as crucial to public health efforts, including surveillance programs to detect when the H5N1 influenza virus might mutate and spark a pandemic,” Reuters writes, adding, “But they are bowing to fear that has become widespread since media reports discussed the studies in December that the engineered viruses ‘may escape from the laboratories’ … or possibly be used to create a bioterror weapon” (Begley, 1/20).
“Scientists at the University of Wisconsin in the United States and at Erasmus University Medical Center in the Netherlands say they are voluntarily halting their work for 60 days,” stating “the two months will give governments, international organizations and the scientific community time to determine whether the research can be conducted safely,” VOA News writes (1/21). The WHO is expected to organize a forum in the coming weeks to discuss the issue, Agence France-Presse reports (Sheridan, 1/21). “Suspensions of biomedical research are almost unheard of; the only other one in the United States was a moratorium from 1974 to 1976 on some types of recombinant DNA research, because of safety concerns,” the New York Times notes (Grady, 1/20).
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