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Regulation

Refusing Cochlear Implants: Is It Child Neglect?

Australian Graeme Clark developed the cochlear implant, or bionic ear, in the 1970s. It does not amplify sound but directly stimulates any functioning auditory nerves in the inner ear. The Australian Government has promised a screening program of all babies for deafness from 2011. At present, only 70 percent children who might benefit are picked up early. The earlier deafness is detected, the more effective treatment can be.

Lobby group Deaf Australia says the implant "implies that deaf people are ill or incomplete individuals, are lonely and unhappy, cannot communicate effectively with others and are all desperately searching for a cure for their condition. [This] demeans deaf people, belittles their culture and language and makes no acknowledgment of the diversity of lives deaf people lead, or their many achievements."
Some deaf parents have denied their children cochlear implants. Is this right?

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Informed consent in the Googlesphere

Here's an interesting snippet

But there's also the fact that Google is stuffed full of people who just love to experiment on its users. For instance, Google Mail uses a very slightly different blue for links than the main search page. Its engineers wondered: would that change the ratio of clickthroughs? Is there an "ideal" blue that encourages clicks? To find out, incoming users were randomly assigned between 40 different shades of links – from blue-with-green-ish to blue-with-blue-ish. It turned out blue-ness encouraged clicks more than green-ness. Who would have guessed? And who would have cared? Google, of course, which wants to get people clicking around the net.

I take this sort of experimentation as utterly, boringly unproblematic

But on one view – this is surreptitious experimentation without consent including randomisation.

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Umbilical cord blood donation: opt out or work on Sundays?

Umbilical
cord blood (UCB) contains haematopoietic stem cells, which can be used for the
treatment of several lethal disorders, including leukaemia
and several types of anaemia. Other sources of haematopoietic stem cells are bone marrow and ordinary peripheral
blood. Unlike bone marrow donation, which requires general anaesthesia, UCB
donation does not cause any inconvenience or significant risks for the donor. Peripheral
blood contains very few stem cells. Another major advantage of using UCB stem
cells is that less genetic similarity is required between donor and recipient.
This increases the chance of finding a ‘match’ and thus of the transplantation
being successful.

Read More »Umbilical cord blood donation: opt out or work on Sundays?

Sometimes justice wears a mask: blogging, anonymity and the open society

After the Times exposed the identity of the police blogger "Night Jack" he has been disciplined by the police force. The blog (now deleted) had won the Orwell Price for political writing and often expressed critical views related to the police and the justice system. In a court ruling Mr Justice Eady claimed that blogging was "essentially a public rather than a private activity" and that it was in the public interest to know who originated opinions and arguments. Do we have a right to anonymity on the net? And is it truly in the public interest to know who every blogger is?

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More on drugs…

In a recent
entry on this weblog, Roger Crisp discusses the recent and controversial
“Release” advertising campaign on drugs (and its slogan “Nice People Take
Drugs”),
and rightly highlights the need for serious and widespread debate on drug
legislation. My home country, Switzerland, precisely had a debate on this issue
a few months ago, when we were called to vote on a popular initiative
purporting to decriminalize the use, purchase, consumption and possession of
cannabis (not of other drugs) – which would have meant placing the consumption
of this drug on a similar plane with that of tobacco or alcohol. This measure
was supposed to be accompanied by others, notably destined to protect young
people. On the 30th of November 2008, however, the Swiss people
rejected the initiative by quite a large majority.

Read More »More on drugs…

Nice People Take Drugs (Too)

The drug and human rights charity *Release* recently launched an advertising campaign in which the slogan ‘Nice People Take Drugs’ was displayed on the sides of London buses. Their aim was to encourage society to face up to the reality that a huge proportion of the population does at least experiment with drugs and to combat the popular assumption, which underlies a good deal of political rhetoric and media coverage, that since drugs are simply ‘evil’ there is no point in seriously debating drug policy. Those ads are now being withdrawn by the company that booked the space, after advice from the Committee of Advertising Practice: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/jun/09/nice-people-drugs-ads-pulled

Apparently, Release has been told that their strap-line would be more acceptable if it included the word ‘too’. This suggests that the CAP may have felt that the public would read the original claim as equivalent to ‘All those who take drugs are nice people’. But even adding the word ‘too’ may not be enough. For the new sentence might be read as: ‘All nice people take drugs, along with other things (such as holidays when they can, advice when they need it, offence when people are rude to them, etc.).’ Of course, no one would have understood either the new or the old sentence in these ways. But in fact, though it should be up to Release how they word their strap-line (the censorship charge they have made doesn’t seem far-fetched), adding ‘too’ does bring out more clearly what they want to say: that we should stop demonizing drug-takers and have an open, impartial, and well-informed debate.

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Precrime in Camden: using DNA profiles for crime prevention

The UK police has an estimated 5.3 million DNA profiles in its databases, of which about 850,000 are of people who were never convicted of any crime (including 24,000 samples of youngsters who have never been convicted, cautioned or charged with any offence). Although the European Court ruled that a policy of retaining profiles of innocent people is illegal, the Home Office seems keen to retain them anyway, at least for serious crimes. Now it is claimed by a police officer that police in Camden deliberately target young people who have not been arrested yet in order to obtain DNA samples. According to him it is part of a long-term crime prevention strategy to discourage future crime. But does pre-emptive acquisition of DNA profiles make sense as crime prevention?

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Neonatal euthanasia without parental consent

A
provocative article soon to be published in the Journal of Bioethical Inquiry
argues that parental consent should not be a prerequisite for neonatal
euthanasia. At present, the only country to permit neonatal euthanasia is the
The Netherlands. Medical personnel there are not prosecuted for actively
euthanizing infants in great suffering, provided that they satisfy the
requirements of the Groningen Protocol, which include obtaining consent from
the infant's parents. In the forthcoming article, Jacob Appel argues that the
requirement for parental consent should be dropped. 

Let's first consider the question of whether it
could be ethically permissible for medical staff to end the life of a child
without the consent of the parents.

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How much should we care about MPs’ expense claims?

Few people
in the UK could have missed the furious storm about MPs’ expense claims that has dominated the news headlines for the past several weeks.  A steady flow of stories has revealed not
only which MPs bent the rules on expenses, but also that many of the rules are themselves objectionable and arguably
facilitate a misuse of taxpayers’ money.

Of course,
few of us enjoy paying tax, but most of us grudgingly accept that it is
necessary if we want certain social goods like decent healthcare and a fair
justice system.  None of us likes to
think of our money instead being directed towards those who already enjoy a
higher income and better job perks than we do. 
What is most striking about the current focus on MPs’ expense claims,
however, is the fact that we are in the middle of a serious recession. 
And the amount of taxpayers’ money used to finance MPs' bogus
mortgage payments, luxury goods,
and furniture is but a drop in the ocean compared to the financial losses suffered by
homeowners due to falling property prices, by the half-million workers who have lost their jobs in the past nine months, and by those still employed whose tax payments must help support the newly jobless.  Given that the impact of a recession on
ordinary people is at least partly the result of government decision-making,
why does the recession consistently take second place in the headlines to the
relatively trivial matter of MPs’ expense claims?

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Bad doctor, bad prosecutor or bad laws?

Ethics, medical practice and the law should ideally coincide. But as a current affair in Sweden shows, it is all too easy for them to collide.

On March 2 police took a doctor into custody at the Astrid Lindgren Children's Hospital in front of her colleauges, suspected of killing an infant. The background is tragic: last year a three month pre-term infant suffered a stroke, causing serious brain damage. This was likely due to a medical mistake that was duly reported. Some months afterwards the dying infant was taken of ventilaton and died, with the consent of the parents. She was given high doses the painkiller morphine and anaesthetic thiopental to prevent suffering. Apparently the prosecutor investigating the initial medical mistake noticed these high levels and decided to investigate whether manslaughter had taken place. Much criticism has been aimed at the prosecutor for the heavy-handed use of the police and putting the doctor into arrest, especially since the events occured several months ago and it is very unlikely there is any danger of tampering with evidence. But it is more troubling that the doctors involved (at least given currently available information) were acting according to standard medical praxis. Are a sizeable fraction of the Swedish medical profession guilty of manslaughter?

Read More »Bad doctor, bad prosecutor or bad laws?