The Daily Mail reports this week on a new blood test to detect
conditions such as Down syndrome or cystic fibrosis in fetuses. The
article raises concerns about ‘designer babies’. Yet given the recent
concern about the risk of miscarrying normal fetuses with current
screening procedures for Down syndrome why isn’t the Daily Mail
welcoming these tests?
In the Observer yesterday, researchers from a major disability charity
have claimed that the risks of screening for Down syndrome during
pregnancy have been underestimated. The researchers suggest that for
every 3 fetuses with Down syndrome that are detected by screening 2
unaffected fetuses miscarry as a complication of the testing process.
Should screening be stopped? If screening continues how should
prospective parents weigh up this risk?
Read More »Testing choices: weighing up risks of death and Down syndrome for fetuses
An eight-year-old Iranian boy has been released after spending nearly two months in Yarl’s Wood immigration removal centre (http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/sep/06/immigration.humanrights). Child M, as he’s known, has been given body searches and now, unsurprisingly, seems to have various physical and psychiatric problems. His case is an especially clear example of the effects of national borders, and border controls, on people’s lives.
A new worry has hit parents: digital drugs. The idea is that sounds can affect brain states, so by listening to the right kind of sounds desired brain states can be induced – relaxation, concentration, happiness, PMS relief or why not hallucinations? Apparently "idosers" walk around high on sound. Just the right thing for a summer moral panic – kids, computers, drugs and pseudoscience.
In the New England Journal of Medicine yesterday, doctors from Denver reported on three controversial cases of heart transplantation from newborn infants. These cases are striking for several reasons. They were examples of so-called ‘donation after cardiac death’ (DCD), an increasingly frequent source of organs for transplantation, but done very rarely in newborns. They are controversial because the transplanted organs were hearts that were ‘restarted’ in recipients after they had stopped in the donor. Transplant surgeons waited only a relatively short period after the donor’s heart had stopped (75 seconds) before starting the organ retrieval process. These transplants raise serious questions about the diagnosis and definition of death.
Read More »When the heart stops: harvesting organs from the newly (nearly) dead
Thirty
years after the first test-tube baby, Nature
asks various experts for their views on what the next thirty years of
reproductive medicine will bring.
Some of the more startling predictions are:
Read More »Reproductive science: is there something we’re missing?
The journal Science is today reporting on a controversial plan by the US National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) to test an alternative treatment for autism on children. The treatment, known as chelation therapy, involves the use of drugs that remove heavy metals from the blood. It’s based on a the theory – unsupported by conventional science – that mercury in vaccines triggers autism.
Chelation therapy is widely used, but its benefits and effects are not well understood. The NIMH have therefore argued that there is a "public health imperative" to test the drug. But opponents claim that any such study would be unethical, since the quality of the trial is likely to be poor, and any results – especially negative ones – would be unlikely to alter the behaviour of parents who support the therapy.
In Australia recently, there has been heated debate about a series of
photographs of naked and semi-naked children by photographer Bill
Henson. The debate was reignited this month when Art Monthly, a major
Australian art magazine, decided to put a picture of a nude 6 year old
girl on its front cover. Politicians have attacked the photographs and
the magazine’s editors
Making headlines last week, Melbourne bioethicist Rob Sparrow argued that in order to create the best future for their children, parents should select only girl children or hermaphrodites. He imagined a “post-sex” world in which males are no longer conceived, and women use frozen sperm, or artificial gametes to reproduce.
It has been reported in the newspapers today that in many parts of the country smokers have been refused access to in-vitro-fertilisation treatment. This appears to be contrary to the national evidence-based guidelines for fertility treatment. Is this unfair?
