Clinical case examines physicians’ duties and risks during an epidemic. Commentaries address physician’s rights vs patients’ rights. Does the duty to treat always override personal or family concerns?
Article explains the role of surveillance by public health epidemiologists in tracking and controlling infectious diseases in the US and around the world.
Article explains the right granted to state public health agencies by the Supreme Court in Jacobson v Massachusetts to mandate vaccination in the presence of actual or threatened danger to the health of its residents from infectious disease.
Clinical case examines physicians’ duties and risks during an epidemic. Commentaries address physician’s rights vs patients’ rights. Does the duty to treat always override personal or family concerns?
A landmark court case in California determined that a competent adult patient has the right to forgo medical treatment and the patient's autonomy supersedes the state's interest in preserving the patient's life.
A bioethicist argues that two journal articles about quality of life-adjusted years research oversimplifies the issue and do not take into consideration people's abilities to adapt to disability and disease.
A health economics professor believes more research is needed on quality of life-adjusted years to explore the way we describe health states, the elicitation of patient values, and how to develop methods for obtaining informed general population preferences.
Elly A. Stolk, MSc and Floortje E. van Nooten, MSc
Two medical technology researchers argue that patients' own valuations of their health states may result in devaluation of interventions that can help them.
The ongoing anthrax vaccination case, Doe v Rumsfeld, tests whether the military can require participation in and punish refusal of a vaccination program while waiving informed consent.