The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 11, Issue 10, Page 15-16, October 2011.

Volume 19, Issue 11, November 2019, Page 37-39.

Interest is growing in the relocalization of staple crops, including wheat, in western Washington (WWA), a nontraditional wheat-growing area. Commercial bakers are potentially important food chain intermediaries in the case of relocalized wheat production. We conducted a mail survey of commercial bakers in WWA to assess their interest in sourcing wheat/flour from WWA, identify the characteristics of bakeries most likely to purchase wheat/flour from WWA, understand the factors important to bakers in purchasing regionally produced wheat/flour, and identify perceived barriers to (...) making such purchases. Sixty-one percent of survey respondents were interested in purchasing WWA wheat/flour. Bakers who used retail strategies to market their products were more likely to be interested in WWA wheat/flour compared to those not using retail methods. Bakers’ current purchases of Washington wheat/flour were not related to their interest in purchasing WWA flour. The most important factors bakers would consider in purchasing regionally produced wheat/flour were consistency of flour quality, quality of flour, and reliability of supply. Cost was the most frequently mentioned barrier to the purchase of regionally produced wheat/flour. Our results are relevant for other areas attempting to reconnect grain producers, commercial bakers, and consumers in mutually beneficial ways. (shrink)

The lung allocation score system in the United States and several European countries gives more weight to risk of death without transplantation than to survival following transplantation. As a result, centers transplant sicker patients, leading to increased length of initial hospitalization. The care of patients who have accumulated functional deficits or additional organ dysfunction during their prolonged stay can be ethically complex. Disagreement occurs between the transplant team, patients and families, and non-transplant health care professionals over the burdens of ongoing (...) intensive intervention. These cases highlight important ethical issues in organ transplantation, including the nature and requirements of transplant informed consent, the limits of physician prognostication, patient autonomy and decision-making capacity following transplant, obligations to organ donors and to other potential recipients, and the impact of program metrics on individualized recipient care. We outline general ethical principles for the care of lung transplant recipients with prolonged hospitalization and give regulatory, research, and patient-centered recommendations for these cases. (shrink)

This book offers a theoretical and practical overview of the specific ethical and legal issues in pediatric organ transplantation. Written by a team of leading experts, Ethical Issues in Pediatric Organ Transplantation addresses those difficult ethical questions concerning clinical, organizational, legal and policy issues including donor, recipient and allocation issues. Challenging topics, including children as donors, donation after cardiac death, misattributed paternity, familial conflicts of interest, developmental disability as a listing criteria, small bowel transplant, and considerations in navigating the media (...) are discussed. It serves as a fundamental handbook and resource for pediatricians, transplant health care professionals, trainees, graduate students, scholars, practitioners of bioethics and health policy makers. (shrink)

This paper offers a contemporary pan-denominational and postmodern Jewish theology. It utilizes the tools of Jewish theological scholarship within a uniquely midrashic format. This format of creative narrative text and scholarly commentary grounds these theological principles within the recognizable stylized system of traditional Jewish exegesis. Rabyam’s theology and the accompanying integral commentary reflect and elucidate feminist, postmodern theological concerns and attitudes. It is my contention that this unique theology is a vital contribution to an inclusive twenty-first century understanding of the (...) Divine. Though the principles of faith alone speak to a general audience, when combined with the annotated commentary, they fill a gap in current scholarship and contribute to a more holistic understanding of a post-modern Judaism not confined to a particular denomination or particular ethos. These principles reflect a Jewish world that is ‘fragmentary, contradictory and turbulent’, as theologian Emile Fackenheim argued. (shrink)

BackgroundThe COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on the health system worldwide. The organ and tissue donation and transplantation (OTDT) system is no exception and has had to face ethical challenges related to the pandemic, such as risks of infection and resource allocation. In this setting, many Canadian transplant programs halted their activities during the first wave of the pandemic.MethodTo inform future ethical guidelines related to the COVID-19 pandemic or other public health emergencies of international concern, we conducted a (...) literature review to summarize the ethical issues.ResultsThis literature review identified three categories of ethical challenges. The first one describes the general ethical issues and challenges reported by OTDT organizations and transplantation programs, such as risks of COVID-19 transmission and infection to transplant recipients and healthcare professionals during the transplant process, risk of patient waitlist mortality or further resource strain where transplant procedures have been delayed or halted, and resource allocation. The second category describes ethical challenges related to informed consent in the context of uncertainty and virtual consent. Finally, the third category describes ethical issues related to organ allocation, such as social considerations in selecting transplant candidates.ConclusionThis literature review highlights the salient ethical issues related to OTDT during the current COVID-19 pandemic. As medical and scientific knowledge about COVID-19 increases, the uncertainties related to this disease will decrease and the associated ethical issues will continue to evolve. (shrink)

Bringing the 12.8% of children with special healthcare needs into the national response to the childhood obesity epidemic will require new information, a view of health promotion beyond that which occurs within healthcare systems, and services and supports in addition to the multi-sectoral strategies presently designed for children overall. These efforts are necessary to protect the health of the nation's 9.4 million children with special health care needs now and long-term.

Although the obesity epidemic appears to have affected all segments of the U.S. population, its impact on children with special health care needs has received little attention. “Children with special health care needs” is a term used in the U.S. to describe children who come to the attention of health care providers and policy makers because they need different services and supports than other children. Government, at both the federal and state levels, has long felt a particular responsibility for safeguarding (...) the health of children with special needs. The definition “children with special health care needs,” in fact, was developed by a work group established by the U.S. Maternal and Child Health Bureau to assist states in their efforts to develop community systems of services for children with complex medical and behavioral conditions. (shrink)

One of six commentaries on “Obesity: Chasing an Elusive Epidemic,” by Daniel Callahan, from the January‐February 2013 issue.

Jewish Agrarian Movements (JAM hereafter) in North America express the many different shapes and iterations of Jewish farming on the continent, grounded in historical perspectives that influence current practices and activities. From within this diversity, common threads emerge with much to contribute to agrarian social movements and scholarship. Jewish values of returning (_t_’_shuvah_), releasing (_shmitah_), and repairing (_tikkun_), along with theories of _doikayt_ (an anti-zionist movement around “hereness”) and radical diasporism, animate JAM’s critical engagement with agri-food systems. As researchers who (...) have both studied and participated in Jewish agrarianism in a variety of U.S. and Canadian contexts, we solidify a series of themes and tensions that emerge from JAM: diaspora and indigeneity, modernity and tradition, Jewish agroecological knowledge production, and lived religion. We argue that, while JAM has not yet been examined thoroughly within critical food scholarship, it has the potential to contribute to broader debates and frameworks within sub-fields such as radical food geographies, critical agrarianism, and decoloniality. Without consideration of JAM as a part the study of food and agriculture, there are risks of marginalization of farmers, activists and researchers of Jewish identity. (shrink)

This book examines how the Romans came to have a literature, how that literature reflected native and foreign impulses, and how it formed a legacy for subsequent generations have become central questions in the cultural history of the Republic. It examines the problem of Rome's literary development by shifting attention from Rome's writers to its readers. The literature we traditionally call 'early' is seen to be a product less of the mid-Republic, when poetic texts began to circulate, than of the (...) late Republic, when they were systematically collected, canonized, and put to new social and artistic uses. Imposing on texts the name and function of literature was often a retrospective activity. This book explores the development of this literary sensibility from the Romans' early interest in epic and drama, through the invention of satire and the eventual enshrining of books in the public collections important to Horace and Ovid. (shrink)

The publication in 1959 of Russell and Burch's ThePrinciplesofHumaneExperimentalTechnique initiated a new era in the history of the debate between science and animal protection, the era of alternatives. Although Russell and Burch never used the word, and although the animal protection movement was somewhat moribund at the time in both England and the United States, within a decade of the book's publication a number of signs indicating a resurgence of public interest in the issue began to appear. At the same (...) time, increased knowledge and understanding of neurophysiology and ethology heightened scientific awareness of the significance of humane treatment in the laboratory and professionalized laboratory animal science. (shrink)

The authors of this article are previous or current members of the Clinical Ethics Consultation Affairs (CECA) Committee, a standing committee of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities (ASBH). The committee is composed of seasoned healthcare ethics consultants (HCECs), and it is charged with developing and disseminating education materials for HCECs and ethics committees. The purpose of this article is to describe the educational research and development processes behind our teaching materials, which culminated in a case studies book called (...) A Case-Based Study Guide for Addressing Patient-Centered Ethical Issues in Health Care (hereafter, the Study Guide). In this article, we also enumerate how the Study Guide could be used in teaching and learning, and we identify areas that are ripe for future work. (shrink)

Nearly a century ago, Friedrich Leo argued with his characteristic acumen that the neo-Ciceronian style of Tacitus'Dialogus de oratoribuswas as much a function of its genre as its subject. ‘The genre’, he observed, ‘demands its style. One who deals with different genres must write in different styles.’ Alfred Gudeman, the target of Leo's review, had therefore missed a key step in the argument for Tacitean authorship when he invoked ‘the influence of subject-matter’ without considering the demands of genre. In hindsight, (...) the point seems almost obvious, and the sophistication of recent work on the date and style of theDialogushas left Gudeman's discussion far behind. The advance in method—if not necessarily in results—has been profound. Leo's success in linking genre and style, however, has also had a second, less happy result: it has encouraged belief in a corresponding link between genre and content, as if Tacitus necessarily embraced Ciceronian values along with his Ciceronian forms. TheDialogusis often thought to accept Cicero's aesthetic agenda and to examine why the orators of succeeding generations failed to maintain its ideals and standards. Perhaps inevitably, its analysis is then read as a rather depressing tale of oratory's literary, social, and moral decline. This view demands reconsideration. To explore, as theDialoguscertainly does, the collapse of Ciceronian values is not necessarily to regret that collapse. We have, I think, too often read our own prejudices into theDialogusby presuming a post-Augustan decline in oratorical standards and, in the process, reducing our sensitivity to important variations in and departures from the generic conventions that Tacitus so deliberately recalls. The result is a significant distortion of theDialogus' view of oratory under the empire. (shrink)

The medical biography of Ludwig van Beethoven remains enigmatic. Some of his health problems, such as his early and eventually profound deafness, are well documented and extensively discussed, although not necessarily well explained . Other medical problems, and his ultimate cause of death, remain unclear. Perhaps unsurprisingly for such an important musical figure, there has been no dearth of speculation about the illnesses that may have befallen Beethoven. Medical historians and physicians have suggested a myriad of illnesses, including but hardly (...) limited to .. (shrink)

Public health agencies regularly survey randomly selected anonymous students to track drug use, sexual activities, and other risk behaviors. Students are unidentifiable, but a recent project that i...

Volume 20, Issue 10, October 2020, Page W4-W7.

W. V. Quine famously argues that though all knowledge is empirical, mathematics is entrenched relative to physics and the special sciences. Further, entrenchment accounts for the necessity of mathematics relative to these other disciplines. Michael Friedman challenges Quine’s view by appealing to historicism, the thesis that the nature of science is illuminated by taking into account its historical development. Friedman argues on historicist grounds that mathematical claims serve as principles constitutive of languages within which empirical claims in physics and the (...) special sciences can be formulated and tested, where these mathematical claims are themselves not empirical but conventional. For Friedman, their conventional, constitutive status accounts for the necessity of mathematics relative to these other disciplines. Here I evaluate Friedman’s challenge to Quine and Quine’s likely response. I then show that though we have reason to find Friedman’s challenge successful, his positive project requires further development before we can endorse it. (shrink)

The article is devoted to identifying the specifics of Russian philosophy through the analysis of F. M. Dostoevsky and L.N. Shestov’s texts. The stylistic features of the two philosophers have been considered, their ways of philosophizing and denying of the cult of reason have been examined. The analysis is carried out using additional literature of French existentialism. To date, there are many researches in which study features of Russian philosophy. It is noted, that one of them are imagery, inseparable connection (...) between philosophy and faith and criticism of rationalism. The excessive cult of reason leads to such problems in the history as the creation of the hydrogen bomb, the environmental crisis and so on. The revolt against reason and the state of groundlessness are a response to the processes of modern rationalization and technocratization, an attempt to go beyond the limits of the usual paradigm, to get out of the closed subjectivity. Thus, it’s necessary to define the limits of the reason and develop a new way of philosophizing, for this reason it is proposed to consider the concept of groundlessness in the philosophy of L.N. Shestov, which makes the attempt to construct a philosophy, avoiding strict logic and excessive rationality. (shrink)