The AMA Journal of Ethics invites original submissions for peer review consideration on the following themes that will be explored in 2024:
February 2024: Health Ecology and Disease Transmission
Human-nonhuman animal disease transmission expresses complex intersections among human and domestic, agricultural, and wildlife animal communities and approximately 75% of emerging infectious diseases are now zoonotic, with continued climate change expected to exacerbate fraught linkages between all environments animals and plants share. One Health is an approach promoting national and international collaboratives, coordinated responses to human population growth, agricultural encroachment and deforestation, ecosystem disruption, and interactions that intensify transmission risk between more highly concentrated human and nonhuman animal reservoirs, human-nonhuman animal contact opportunities, and novel or evolving microbes. Climate change diminishes biodiversity; diminished biodiversity undermines natural ecological balance dynamics between pathogens and hosts and has already influenced health care dramatically. This theme issue investigates the nature and scope of our ethical, social, and cultural responses to these key changes.
We invite manuscripts for the February 2024 issue of the AMA Journal of Ethics® that consider ethically relevant features of human-nonhuman animal disease transmission in ecological context. Manuscripts submitted for peer review consideration and inclusion in this issue must follow Instructions for Authors and be submitted by 29 March 2023.
March 2024: Environmental Architecture of Psychiatric Inpatient Safety
When modern inpatient psychiatric units look to reduce patients’ risk of harm to self or others by modifying the environment and limiting patients’ access to personal items, patients’ comfort can be compromised. This should prompt us to carefully consider when patients’ experiences of their care environments undermine the therapeutic purposes of their hospitalization. This theme issue investigates criteria we use for assessing and evaluating patients’ risk of harm to self or others and which values should guide which iatrogenic harm risks we accept in their stead. Iatrogenic harms matter just as much, clinically and ethically, as patient- or illness-generated harms, at least in terms of policies and practices that shape inpatient environmental architecture as means by which we try to promote health outcomes as ends.
This issue of the AMA Journal of Ethics® considers policies and practices, the de facto architects and designers of psychiatric inpatients environments, which influence patients’ experiences. We welcome manuscripts expressing a wide range of perspectives from multiple stakeholders that motivate inquiry grounded in ethics, art, law, economics, risk management, history, society and culture, health professions education, and more.
Manuscripts submitted for peer review consideration and inclusion in this issue must follow Instructions for Authors and be submitted by 30 April 2023.
April 2024: Global Medical Supply Chain Security
Individual patients’ safety and public health were compromised by critical drug shortages, substandard medications, and extremely restricted access to personal protective equipment during the COVID-19 pandemic. As health organizations and workers struggled to meet demands posed by unprecedented patient numbers and illness acuity, our complex global health ecosystem with long-standing upstream supply chain vulnerabilities failed to meet emergent downstream demand in several ways. First, material procurement and ingredient sourcing were inadequate. Second, operations lacking transparency made stopping propagation of substandard or falsified medications ineffective, inefficient, or impossible. Finally, logistical obfuscation made environmental consequences of waste management hard to assess and steward responsibly. Policy makers, health care organizations, regulators, manufacturers, and distributors each have roles in building and maintaining global medical supply chain security. This theme issue investigates how these and other agents’ failures to cultivate public health capacity, nourish sustainable production processes, and carefully maintain systemic supply chain resiliency are neither accidental nor simply unfortunate, but unjust.
We invite manuscripts for the April 2024 issue of the AMA Journal of Ethics® that explore cross-disciplinary perspectives on preparing to meet demands of a next pandemic period of intense cultural, political, and economic volatility. We encourage manuscripts about strategies for bolstering supply chain functioning and welcome submissions from international stakeholders with first-hand experience of supply chain dysfunction that compromise health and health care.
Manuscripts submitted for peer review consideration and inclusion in this issue must follow Instructions for Authors and be submitted by 30 May 2023.
May 2024: Antimicrobial Resistance
Microbes include bacteria, parasites, viruses and fungi that constantly evolve. Antimicrobial resistance (AMR ) happens when microbes change, becoming harder to treat in individual human and nonhuman animals and plants with antibiotic, antiparasitic, antiviral, and antifungal agents. Resistant pathogens are more easily transmissible across human and nonhuman ecology. National and international burden of AMR has been assessed in terms of infection incidence, deaths, hospital length of stay, and location-specific costs of developing and applying specific pathogen–drug combinations to try to save lives and preserve food supplies. Routine and focused surveillance is key to understanding microbiological, individual, social, and ecological root causes, downstream effects, and sources of inequity in AMR. This theme issue canvasses neglected ethics, justice, and contextual features of AMR.
We invite manuscripts for this May 2024 issue of the AMA Journal of Ethics® that consider wide-ranging perspectives on AMR as a source of iatrogenic, zoonotic, and other harms and additional kindred topics of clinical, ethical, social, and cultural importance.
Manuscripts submitted for peer review consideration and inclusion in this issue must follow Instructions for Authors and be submitted by 30 June 2023.
June 2024: Antimicrobial Stewardship
Antimicrobial stewardship is a multisectoral field dedicated to coordinating responses to threats posed by antimicrobial resistance (AMR). This issue considers the field’s membership, organization, methods, ethical foundations, and future. Overall, responding to AMR demands prioritization of stewardship as an ethical value that guides domestic and international agencies’ and programs’ efforts to preserve antimicrobial capacity, efficacy, and effectiveness. Measures of clinicians’ and organizations’ prescription practices and patients’ uses of antibiotic, antiparasitic, antiviral, and antifungal agents are empirical cornerstones of antimicrobial stewardship. Formulating, implementing, and evaluating stewardship improvement recommendations are also key from ethical, anthropological, social, and organizational perspectives.
We invite manuscripts for this June 2024 issue of the AMA Journal of Ethics® that consider antimicrobial stewardship successes and investigate ongoing challenges from wide-ranging perspectives.
Manuscripts submitted for peer review consideration and inclusion in this issue must follow Instructions for Authors and be submitted by 30 July 2023.
August 2024: Standards in Medical-Legal Partnerships
Complex demands of patients’ socially, culturally, and politically situated health needs have given rise to what have become known as medical-legal partnerships (MLPs). An MLP is a model of US-based health and legal service provision that generally looks to offer combined, single-site interprofessional responses to patients whose health status and access to health services can be compromised by their need for legal help. Patients who are immigrants, were recently incarcerated, or lack reliable and safe shelter or employment, for example, can experience health vulnerabilities that call for legal expertise, perhaps in the form of advice, aid in petitioning a court or program, referral, representation in administrative proceedings, or advocacy. This theme issue investigates strategies by which clinicians and attorneys should work together to screen for and respond with care to legal determinants of patients’ health.
We invite manuscripts for the August 2024 issue of the AMA Journal of Ethics® that explore these and related topics. Also welcome are manuscripts that consider whether and to what extent it is ethically, clinically, or legally problematic for MLP interventions to lack standardization throughout the US. On one hand, MLPs flourish when they have regulatory flexibility to meet location-specific needs of patients and communities. On the other hand, in some contexts and for some patient populations, we ought to wonder whether and how MLPs have evolved to the point at which medical-legal interventions should have national standards, such as those considered by the National Center for Medical-Legal Partnership, and oversight to ensure safe, reliable practice and service to patient-clients.
Manuscripts submitted for peer review consideration and inclusion in this issue must follow Instructions for Authors and be submitted by 30 September 2023.
September 2024: What Do Good Science and Ethics Require of Human-Centered Research Using Nonhuman Animals?
Nonhuman animals have long been and continue to be routinely used in biomedical and behavioral research to promote human health. When SARS-CoV2 infections triggered a race to develop and scale global access to vaccines in 2019, two key innovations happened to the supply chain of animals created, raised, and used for science: (1) experiments and trials regarded as essential were prioritized and (2) governments and researchers shortened vaccine production timelines. Clinical and public health urgency concentrated and acutely focused demand for live mammals—ferrets, guinea pigs, hamsters, mice, nonhuman primates, pigs, and rats—in ways that also intensified demand for efficient protocol designs and streamlined methods of human vaccine research and development. Reasonable people can still disagree about when, why, and how nonhuman animals should be sacrificed for human health, but we now know that human health, specifically vaccine development, flourish even when we sanction fewer nonhuman animals’ cultivation and deaths for science. This theme issue investigates what this pandemic revelation means from clinical, ethical, legal, and policy standpoints for the future of human-centered research.
We invite manuscripts for this September 2024 issue of the AMA Journal of Ethics® that consider how we ought to think about the ethical, economic, translational, and clinical predictive value of nonhuman animal uses to promote human health. We seek wide-ranging, cross-disciplinary manuscripts that consider the roles and costs of speciesism in the enterprise of health care; imagine animal research substitutes that offer greater economic payoff and predictive power of research; identify strategies for better achieving our minimal obligations to streamline protocol design and eliminate excess nonhuman animal injury, illness, and death; investigate whether and to what extent the post-COVID-19 pandemic climate demands redefinition of key concepts, such as necessary animal research, unnecessary nonhuman animal suffering, or the assumed ethical imperative to prioritize human over nonhuman animal interests.
Manuscripts submitted for peer review consideration and inclusion in this issue must follow Instructions for Authors and be submitted by 30 October 2023.