Footnote: This article will be jointly published in the Journal of Andrology and the International Journal of Andrology.History: Andrology is the study of health issues specific to men, with a focus on basic aspects of their reproductive system (gonads, endocrine, and accessory organs), and diagnosis and treatment of medical problems ...

I challenge the idea that the argument from potential (AFP) represents a valid moral objection to abortion. I consider the form of AFP that was defended by Hare, which holds that abortion is against the interests of the potential person who is prevented from existing. My reply is that AFP, ...

Advances in regenerative nanomedicine raise a host of ethical, legal, and social questions that healthcare providers and scientists will need to consider. These questions and concerns include definitions, appropriate applications, dual use, potential risks, regulations, and access. In this chapter, we provide an overview of the questions and concerns and ...

Background. While assisted reproductive technology (ART), including in vitro fertilization has given hope to millions of couples suffering from infertility, it has also introduced countless ethical, legal, and social challenges. The objective of this paper is to identify the aspects of ART that are most relevant to present-day society and ...

This issue of The Journal of Medical Toxicology includes a position statement regarding the use of pressure immobilization for the pre-hospital treatment of North American Crotalinae envenomation. This commentary discusses the background behind the creation of the position statement and explores the issues involved in applying science to real-world public ...

A deeply entrenched status hierarchy in the United States classifies African Americans as lower status than Caucasians. Concurrently, African Americans face marketplace discrimination; they are treated as inferior and poor. Because having money and spending money signify status, we explored whether African Americans might elevate their willingness to pay for ...

These guidelines update previous guidance published in 2005. They have been revised by a group who are members of the UK and Ireland Neuroendocrine Tumour Society with endorsement from the clinical committees of the British Society of Gastroenterology, the Society for Endocrinology, the Association of Surgeons of Great Britain and ...

How has engineering ethics addressed gender concerns to date? How have the ideas of feminist philosophers and feminist ethicists made their way into engineering ethics? What might an explicitly feminist engineering ethics look like? This paper reviews some major themes in feminist ethics and then considers three areas in which ...

This article analyzes the religio-ethical discussions of Muslim religious scholars, which took place in Europe specifically in the UK and the Netherlands, on organ donation. After introductory notes on fatwas (Islamic religious guidelines) relevant to biomedical ethics and the socio-political context in which discussions on organ donation took place, the ...

A disaster is a situation that overwhelms the local population's capacity to respond, thus necessitating a request for assistance from outside the impacted area. In these circumstances, needs usually outweigh resources. The objective of response is to do the greatest good for the greatest number of people (the utilitarian principle). ...

ABSTRACT: BACKGROUND: Emergency departments across the globe follow a triage system in order to cope with overcrowding. The intention behind triage is to improve the emergency care and to prioritize cases in terms of clinical urgency. DISCUSSION: In emergency department triage, medical care might lead to adverse consequences like delay ...

The contamination of environments with radionuclides can give rise to consequences that encompass far more than health risks from exposure to radiation. As experience from Chernobyl demonstrated, both the accident and remediation measures can have serious social and economic consequences. This paper presents a review of some of these issues, ...

Comprehensive Soldier Fitness (CSF), the focus of the January 2011 special issue of the American Psychologist, is a $125 million resilience training initiative designed to reduce and prevent the adverse psychological consequences of combat for soldiers and veterans. These are worthy goals. Soldiers and veterans deserve the best care possible, ...

The Atlantic Canada Oncology Group (ACOG) Symposium is an annual meeting. For the first 8 years it was held in Cornerbrook (NL, Canada) and for the last 7 years it has been held in Prince Edward Island (Canada). The target audience are medical and radiation oncologists from across the Atlantic ...

The huge potential of biobanks/genetic databases for the research community has been recognised across jurisdictions in both publicly funded and commercial sectors. But although there is tremendous potential there are likewise potential difficulties. The long-term storage of personal health information and samples poses major challenges. This is an area is ...

To define the effectiveness of recent efforts by the Australian Division of World Action on Salt and Health, and the Heart Foundation in New Zealand to reduce sodium levels in breads in Australia and New Zealand. Data on the sodium contents of packaged sliced bread products sold in Australian and ...

The American Society for Bioethics and the Humanities (ASBH) issued its Core Competencies for Health Care Ethics Consultation just as it is becoming ever clearer that secular ethics is intractably plural and without foundations in any reality that is not a social-historical construction (ASBH Core Competencies for Health Care Ethics ...

This report on intensity-modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) is part of a series of white papers addressing patient safety commissioned by the American Society for Radiation Oncology's (ASTRO) Target Safely Campaign. The document has been approved by the ASTRO Board of Directors, endorsed by the American Association of Physicists in Medicine ...

Conflicts of interest in medicine have received significant attention in recent years, through the public and professional media, federal and state governments, and through a 2009 report of the Institute of Medicine on Conflict of Interest in Medical Research, Education and Practice. The Council of Medical Specialty Societies (CMSS) Code ...

African Americans trail European Americans in terms of academic achievement, even when accounting for differences in socioeconomic status. One cause of this gap may be racial discrimination. In the current article the authors hypothesized that early perceived racial discrimination (by 5th grade) would predict college enrollment, mediated by changes from ...

Latin America is undergoing profound social, economic, political, demographic, and epidemiologic change. Reproductive health indicators have generally improved over the past two decades, but most pregnancies are still unintended and more than 4 million are terminated annually. Clandestine abortions necessitated by restrictive legal and social structures cause more than 1,000 ...

Dr T. Marandi, President 2009–2011, discusses the role of this young society in a small Northern European nation

A recent study by Castellani et al. (JAMA 302(23):2573-2579, 2009) describes the population-level effects of the choices of individuals who underwent molecular carrier screening for cystic fibrosis (CF) in Veneto, in the northeastern part of Italy, between 1993 and 2007. We discuss some of the ethical issues raised by the ...

ABSTRACT: Western Australia recently hosted Australia's inaugural national rare disease symposium, entitled Awakening Australia to Rare Diseases: Global perspectives on establishing a coordinated approach to a national plan (www.raredisease.com.au) in the port city of Fremantle, Western Australia from the 17th-20th of April 2011. The Office of Population Health Genomics (OPHG), ...

Both of us have been involved with helping professions, especially new scientific or technological professions, develop ethics programs-for undergraduates, graduates, and practitioners. By "ethics program", we mean any strategy for teaching ethics, including developing materials. Our purpose here is to generalize from that experience to identify the chief elements needed ...

Since 2008, the World Economic Forum has identified noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) as a leading threat to the global economy both in terms of their cost and likelihood of happening. The Global Agenda Council on NCDs, a think tank of leaders in the field, was created by the World Economic Forum ...

The Americas Hepato-Pancreato Biliary Association (AHPBA) Annual 2011 Meeting provided a forum for discussion of multidisciplinary advances surrounding six tracks including the liver, biliary system, liver transplantation, pancreas, imaging and biomedical engineering and general hepato-pancreato biliary (HPB) surgical disease. The meeting and postgraduate courses attracted the largest ever attendance and ...

Summary of a position statement from the Thoracic Society of Australia and New Zealand*

On November fourth and fifth 2010 a group of more than 100 international investigators gathered in Atlanta for the second Osteoarthritis (OA) Biomarkers Global Initiative workshop titled "Genetics and Genomics: New Targets in OA". The first workshop took place in April 2009 and focused on in vitro (soluble) biomarkers whilst the ...

In September 1950, the Genetics Society of America (GSA) dedicated its annual meeting to a "Golden Jubilee of Genetics" that celebrated the 50th anniversary of the rediscovery of Mendel's work. This program, originally intended as a small ceremony attached to the coattails of the American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS) ...

Introduction The rapidly growing imbalance of the sex ratio at birth (SRB) in China since the late 1980s demonstrates that, despite an extensive official prohibition, sex-selective abortion has been widely practised there in the past two or three decades. Given the reality of 30-40 million missing females, China has a ...

Abstract When bioinformatics education is considered, several issues are addressed. At the undergraduate level, the main issue revolves around conveying information from two main and different fields: biology and computer science. At the graduate level, the main issue is bridging the gap between biology students and computer science students. However, ...

Since the advent of test-tube babies, advances in the biomedical field have risen steadily. In parallel, the scientific body has never since ceased to debate the ethical issues that they arise. This is particularly the case regarding saviour-sibling. Saviour-sibling refers to a child who is conceived to cure an older ...

"Good samaritan" donation has been of great interest in Italy. At the request of the Presidency of the Council of Ministers, the National Committee on Bioethics expressed its opinion on the matter. While highlighting its controversial aspects, the assessment was favorable. The National Council for Health established working criteria. Yet ...

Proclaimed "International Year of Biodiversity", will 2010 hold all its promises? Reminder: initiated by the Convention on Biological Diversity ratified after the global summit in Rio de Janeiro, delegations from more than one hundred countries gathered in Johannesburg in 2002 and committed themselves to slowing the erosion of biodiversity by ...

Schuurman H-J. Xenotransplantation: from the lab to the clinic. Clin Transplant 2011 DOI: 10.1111/j.1399-0012.2011.01471.x. © 2011 John Wiley & Sons A/S. Abstract:  This manuscript presents a summary of the Symposium "Xenotransplantation, from the Lab to the Clinic," held at the XXIII International Congress of The Transplantation Society, August 2010. This ...

This article provides information and commentaries on trials which were presented at the Hotline and Clinical Trial Update Sessions during the Late Breaking Clinical Trial Sessions at the 60th annual meeting of the American College of Cardiology in New Orleans, USA, from 2nd April to 5th April 2011. This article ...

Sanz M, Lang NP, Kinane DF, Berglundh T, Chapple I, Tonetti MS. Seventh European Workshop on Periodontology of the European Academy of Periodontology at the Parador at La Granja, Segovia, Spain. J Clin Periodontol 2011; 38 (Suppl. 11): 1-2. doi: 10.1111/j.1600-051X.2010.01692.x.

The aim of this paper is to introduce some characteristics of the historical as well as current situation of nanotech research and development in Japan in particular including regulations, and to discuss how ethical issues of nanotechnology should be addressed or how the ethics of nanotechnology should be constructed to ...

Introduction: In the last few years, several new purine and pyrimidine nucleoside analogs have been synthesized and made available for both preclinical studies and clinical trials. Areas covered: This article summarizes recent achievements in the mechanism of action, pharmacological properties and clinical activity and toxicity as well as the emerging ...

The Japanese Society of Toxicologic Pathology (JSTP) has a differing conceptual framework from the Japanese Society of Pathology (JSP) and Japanese Society of Toxicology (JST) and was founded in 1985 by the leadership of late Dr. Yasukazu Nishiyama with the cooperation of several founding members and the support of JSP. ...

Networking is key to overcoming the logistical, methodological and ethical problems related to the implementation of paediatric studies. The adoption of legislation to encourage paediatric clinical trials by the American and European regulatory agencies has opened a new era in the assessment of drug safety and efficacy in children. Two ...

The International Society of Orthopaedic Centers was formed in 2006 as a think tank that would bring together thought leaders in orthopaedic surgery from major orthopaedic academic centers around the world. The Society's mission is to share knowledge and strategies, improve patient care, and foster clinical, educational, and scientific collaboration. ...

This paper analyzes statistical decisions during the interim analyses of clinical trials. After some general remarks about the ethical and scientific demands of clinical trials, I introduce the notion of a hard-case clinical trial, explain the basic idea behind it, and provide a real example involving the interim analyses of ...

A "microdose clinical trial" (microdosing) is one kind of early phase exploratory clinical trial, administering the compound at doses estimated to have no pharmacological or toxicological effects, aimed at screening candidates for further clinical development. This article's objective is to clarify the ethical, legal, and social implications (ELSI) of such ...

Clinical trials of novel agents often present several layers of ethical challenge. Because time and resources for ethical and safety review are limited, how investigators, IRBs, and regulators allocate attention to a trial's various safety dimensions itself represents a critical ethical question. In what follows, I use the example of ...

The violence and duration of fighting throughout the Great War created an intense feeling of vulnerability among the men engaged in battle, which challenged their perception of manliness. When the Americans joined the war in 1917, the balance between the two opposing armies was modified and the psychological crises of ...

The Endocrine Society of Australia was formed in 1958 with the aims of advancing knowledge and practice in endocrinology (the study of hormones) and to bring together physicians and scientists in this area of study. It was one of the first medical specialist societies in Australia. From humble beginnings with ...

The causes of socioeconomic inequality have been debated since the time of Plato. Many reasons for the development of stratification have been proposed, from the need for hierarchical control over large-scale irrigation systems to the accumulation of small differences in wealth over time via inheritance processes. However, none of these ...

This symposium takes as its point of departure two books by Massimo Livi Bacci, Conquest and El Dorado in the Marshes, published in English in 2008 and 2010. Livi Bacci assesses widely varying estimates of the demographic dimensions of the collapse of the Native populations following their contact with Europeans ...