The Food and Drug Administration is expected to expand access to experimental medications for terminally ill patients later this year, but is resisting an attempt by a patient-advocacy group to make access to unapproved drugs a constitutional right.  Some bioethecists believe the dilemma is  a priority issue between the patient’s need for access to treatments and [...]

As Congress renews debate about funding human embryonic stem cell research, people are deciding what to do with their excess embryos. Only the ’parents’ of the embryos are legally entitled to decide what to do with the frozen embryos. There are four basic options and no consensus as to which one is the universally ethical choice: (i) discarding the embryos, (ii) making them available [...]

Cancer treatments can leave women infertile.  For one woman, chemotherapy abated her ovarian cancer, but left her infertile. She was left with only one option to avoid a relapse: Find an egg donor, have children and get a hysterectomy — in five years or less. 
Today women can browse through photos and personal statements while shopping [...]

South Africa is considering forcibly detaining people who carry a deadly strain of tuberculosis that threatens to cause a global pandemic.
Read more: The dilemma of a deadly disease: patients may be forcibly detained

New disclosure language proposed to help clinical researchers better communicate financial conflicts of interests associated with their research:
***The person leading this medical research study might benefit financially from this study. The Institutional Review Board and a committee at ABC University have reviewed the possibility of a financial benefit. They believe that the possible financial benefit [...]

A national poll conducted shortly after actor Michael J. Fox’s televised appeals for stem-cell research shows that support for studying embryonic stem cells fell in the past year.  The supporters dropped from 58 percent to 54 percent and the percentage of those strongly or somewhat opposed rose from 32 percent in 2005 to 37 percent [...]

Genetic tests for detecting 14 inheritable characteristics including obesity, intelligence, physical strength, hypochondria, alcoholism, longevity, asthma, violence, curiosity, lung cancer, and high blood pressure will be banned by the Korean Ministry of Health and Welfare.  Click here to learn more

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued on January 16, 2007, a draft guidance recommending a streamlined path to licensure for establishments that manufacture cord blood for certain medical conditions. Placental/umbilical cord blood is a rich source of precursor cells capable of differentiating into mature blood cells. These precursor cells are known as hematopoietic stem/progenitor cells [...]

New technologies: A New York hospital is taking steps to offer the nation’s first uterus transplant, a radical experiment that might allow women whose wombs were removed or are defective to bear children.  More information click here 
In 1959, the United Nations General Assembly declared: “… the child, by reason of his physical and mental immaturity, needs [...]

Parents decide to use medical treatments to keep their severely mentally disabled daughter child-sized for the rest of her life. Nine-year-old Ashley suffers from a type of brain damage doctors call static encephalopathy and has the mental ability of a 3-month-old baby. She can’t walk, talk or keep her head up and is fed through [...]