After a prolonged disagreement with patient groups, the NHS’s funding guidance body, NICE, has approved the £10,000-an-eye blindness treatment, Lucentis. The drug has been shown to halt the progression of wet age-related macular degeneration (AMD), the most common cause of blindness in developed countries. But as the BBC note, in approving it, NICE may have unwittingly deprived the NHS of a much cheaper alternative.
I wrote recently
about the controversial news that surgeons in Denver had taken organs,
including the hearts, from newborn infants who had died in intensive
care.
In recent years the retrieval of organs from patients whose hearts have
stopped (so-called donation after cardiac death, DCD) has become more
popular. In part this is because of the problem that there is a
shortage of organ donors who are brain dead. It is also because of the
recognition that when patients die after removal of life support, their
organs may still be viable for transplantation.
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
If, like
me, you were one of the kids whose preferred superpower was invisibility, you
may soon be in luck. The BBC reports
today that US scientists have
created a material that could one day be used to make people and objects invisible. The material, which has so far been created
only on a microscopic scale, neither absorbs nor reflects light,
meaning that anyone looking at an object covered in it would see what
lies behind the object rather than the object itself. It’s likely that such technology will be
snapped up first by the military, but perhaps, in years to come, invisibility
cloaks will be available to all.
For some,
the idea of being invisible is distasteful. Being invisible means being able to get away with anything – and
why bother to act morally when you can be sure that you’ll never be caught
out? In this case, would a world full of
people who can turn invisible at the drop of a hat be a world full of thieves,
cheats, and sneaks?
Read More »Would you rather be invisible or be able to fly? (Or: are you a sneaky superhero?)
Yesterday’s Daily Mail online contains an opinion piece bemoaning the decision by NICE – the UK body responsible for rationing healthcare resources – to decline funding for four new treatments for Kidney Cancer. The Mail complains:
…what does NICE offer by way of explanation? A cold, calculating statement that, while the drugs work for many of those with advanced kidney cancer, they are not ‘cost-effective’.
What a clinical way to assess whether a person should be afforded precious extra months and years of life, or consigned to a ‘death sentence’.
I don’t want to defend NICE’s decision in this particular case, but the Mail’s attack on NICE’s "clinical" decision-making process is clearly unjustified.
Nature reports that in response to analysis done by bioethicist Robert Streiffer (and published in the Hastings Center Report), Stanford University may withdraw the use for research of several of its publicly funded stem cell lines because of concerns about consent. In 2001 President Bush decreed that only lines already in existence would be eligible for federal funding – 21 lines were subsequently approved by the NIH.
House prices have been falling quickly in both the US and, more recently, the UK. Newspaper reports tend to use negative language to refer to this fall. For example, todays edition of The Independent says:
Today’s gloomy data, which is worse than economists had forecast, …
However, it is not at all obvious that low house prices are a bad thing.
Yesterday the world celebrated the arrest of Radovan Karadzic, the ex-Bosnian Serb leader who has twice been indicted by the UN War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague, and is charged with – among other atrocities — ordering his forces to kill at least 7,500 Muslim men and boys in Srebenica in July 1995 as part of a campaign to terrorize and demoralize the population.
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?
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
