scholarly journals Dangerous Liaisons?

2000 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-127
Author(s):  
Norman L Jones

I sometimes feel that I am so dominated by circumstances and coincidences that I have little free choice, for example, when approaching an editorial. A case in point was a few days last month during which I attended a well-sponsored meeting of the Ontario Lung Association, reviewed a couple of papers reporting drug trials, read of the threats of litigation made by pharmaceutical companies to two Ontario researchers, heard of a public apology made by the New England Journal of Medicine regarding reviewers' conflicts of interest and received a critical letter from Dr Rob McFadden, an associate editor of the Canadian Respiratory Journal, about a sponsored publication that accompanied the last issue of 1999. All this I suppose reflects our rather ambivalent relationship with the pharmaceutical industry that supports many professional and academic programs but clearly expects some returns in addition to corporate tax benefits. We are now dependent on the industry's financial backing for academic and professional meetings that have become so large that they require large and expensive venues. But then the industry has the right to expect some return on its "investment" in such meetings.

Stanovnistvo ◽  
2001 ◽  
Vol 39 (1-4) ◽  
pp. 119-130 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hajrija Mujovic-Zornic

In this paper the author discusses the nature and importance of the right to reproduce, in particular the right to sterilisation. In the time past sterilization has been practiced only as a measure of penal policy or the prevention of mental health diseases. Today, mostly we can speak about the right to sterilization (especially reversible sterilization). The patient have a free choice to decide any method of contraception and that could be a voluntary sterilization (also called human, contraceptive, non-therapeutical in French law, and obliging in German law). Various legal questions about this right can be raised, in accordance of state of reproductive rights (how they are regulated by the law) and the protection of reproductive rights (especially the right of pregnant woman as a patient). Yugoslav law not yet has a complete regulation and adequate solutions in this area, except the abortion law. The primary gynecology care has contraceptive counseling, but concrete measures and education are insufficient. It cannot begin to give consistent answers to all of these questions without a coherent conception of the right to reproduce, which is the primary duty of legal experts.


Author(s):  
Jérémie Gilbert

The issue of sovereignty over natural resources has been a key element in the development of international law, notably leading to the emergence of the principle of States’ permanent sovereignty over their natural resources. However, concomitant to this focus on States’ sovereignty, international human rights law proclaims the right of peoples to self-determination over their natural resources. This has led to a complex and ambivalent relationship between the principle of States’ sovereignty over natural resources and peoples’ rights to natural resources. This chapter analyses this conflicting relationship and examines the emergence of the right of peoples to freely dispose of their natural resources and evaluates its potential role in contemporary advocacy. It notably explores how indigenous peoples have called for the revival of their right to sovereignty over natural resources, and how the global peasants’ movement has pushed for the recognition of the concept of food sovereignty.


2020 ◽  
Vol 79 (Suppl 1) ◽  
pp. 1288.1-1289
Author(s):  
I. Mcnicol ◽  
A. Bosworth ◽  
C. Jacklin ◽  
J. Galloway

Background:NRAS follows best practice, evidence-based standards in all we do. Whilst huge strides have been made in the diagnosis and treatment of RA, the impact on quality of life can be significant and for many this disease remains hard to come to terms with. NRAS services and resources can improve the outcomes of people with RA/Adult JIA through a framework of supported self-management resources tailored to individual need. It is particularly important to provide the right support at the beginning of a person’s journey with RA, when unhelpful health beliefs, anxiety and incorrect information can influence how someone responds to prescribed medication and treatment thus impeding their ability to achieve the best outcomes. We know, for example, that many people do not take their medication as prescribed which reduces their chances of achieving remission or low disease activity state.Objectives:To demonstrate that by referring patients online as part of a quality improvement programme to NRAS Right Start Service, we can show improved outcomes for patients with early RA when measured by the MSKHQ. Referred patients will benefit by: a) Better understanding what RA is; b) knowing how it can affect them; c) getting the right support; d) feeling more in control; receiving a tailored pack of information that meets their personal needs; e) be able to talk to a like-minded person who has lived with RA. It’s a 4 step process which starts with the health professional referring their patient to NRAS on line. NICE Quality Standard 3 states that “Adults with rheumatoid arthritis are given opportunities throughout the course of their disease to take part in educational activities that support self-management.” Our service enables health professionals to meet their responsibilities against this national quality standard.Methods:In preparation for the introduction of this service at BSR congress 2019, an audit of the NRAS helpline service was undertaken at the end of 2018 and remains on going. Currently we have 224 responses which have been analysed against specific criteria. An Advisory Board comprising 7 clincians, from different hospitals was appointed to work with NRAS on this important research.Results:In the helpline audit, when asked ‘how concerned are you about your disease’?, alarmingly, 78% of those surveyed scored their level of concern about their disease at 7 or higher out of 10, while only 8% scored it at 5 or below. When asked about the emotional effects of their RA, 62% scored it as 7 or more where 10 was the worst possible impact. 94% of survey respondents said that they would definitely or very likely recommend NRAS and its services to another person. These results led to the development of New2RA Right Start launched in 2019, whereby health professionals across the UK can refer their patients directly to NRAS via a consented online referral which is fully GDPR compliant. To date (31stJan, 2020), we have made calls to 101 patients, from 24 referring hospitals of which 55 have been successfully completed, 34 have had information sent through the post although our helpline team were unable to speak to them, and 12 remain open. Data analysis on the service is being carried out by King’s College Hospital London, comparing the results of patients who have been referred to Right Start within the national audit who have completed a baseline and 3 month follow up MSKHQ and patients in the audit who have not participated in Right Start.Conclusion:Anecdotally, we have had a tremendous response to this service from both patients and referring health professionals. We await data from King’s on the above figures, which we will have within the next 2 months and further data, should this abstract be accepted, will be available prior to June 2020. Right Start enables health professionals to comply with QS3 above, of the NICE Quality Standards in RA, one of the key standards against which they are being audited in the NEIAA national audit. Once data and write up in a peer review journal has been published we plan to roll this service out to people with more established disease.References:[1]To be done, not included in word count.Acknowledgments:I would like to thank Ailsa Bosworth MBE, Clare Jacklin, and James GallowayDisclosure of Interests:Iain McNicol Shareholder of: GSK, Ailsa Bosworth Speakers bureau: a number of pharmaceutical companies for reasons of inhouse training, advisory boards etc., Clare Jacklin Grant/research support from: NRAS has received grants from pharmaceutical companies to carry out a number of projects, Consultant of: I have been paid a speakers fee to participate in advisory boards, in house training of staff and health professional training opportunities, Speakers bureau: Various pharma companies, James Galloway: None declared


2008 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-90 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce Nissen
Keyword(s):  

This article examines in detail union busting in a nursing home facility in Florida and asks whether the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) would have protected workers' freedom to choose if it had been in effect at the time. It systematically applies EFCA's provisions to the events of the case and concludes that EFCA would have been helpful to the workers. However, EFCA would not have erased all obstacles to free employee choice, especially for low-wage workers like these. It also reveals that one of the least known features of EFCA would have been most crucial in this case.


Author(s):  
Jelena Janković ◽  

The first step of a positive change in the system of service-legal relations is a change of view on the role and importance of service users. By providing opportunity to the service user to be an active and important member of the service-legal relationship, a far-reaching and universal value of humanization of the service economy sector is achieved. In such circumstances, the moral authority of the service law is realized through its justice and through voluntary obedience to the law of the subjects of the service-legal relationship. Precisely, this moral dimension of the rule of law, in the service economy sector is realized by applying the principles of service suitability and the right to free choice. In this regard, the paper analyzes the moral dimension and culture of the rule of law in the service sector, based on the principle of service suitability and the right to free choice, which are presented in the paper as guardians of justice of the service-legal norm.


2018 ◽  
Vol 31 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. 78-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kheng Tian Lim

Abstract Background Odynophagia can be caused by infective and non-infective inflammatory processes, benign and malignant esophageal disorders such as achalasia, gastro-esophageal reflux disease and carcinoma. Methods We described two unusual cases of odynophagia and their individual management. Results Case 1 is a 21 year-old Indian man presented with 2 days history of odynophagia after taking doxycycline capsules indicated for acne. An esophagogastroduodenoscopy (OGD) was performed and showed multiple mid esophageal ulcers. Esophageal biopsy taken showed inflammatory ulcer slough with no fungal infection, dysplasia or malignancy. Doxycycline was stopped and patient recovered with complete resolution of odynophagia. Case 2 is a 55 year-old Chinese man presented with 1 day history of odynophagia and severe chest pain after eating a bowl of hot fish soup. A CT Thorax was performed which showed a localised perforation of the right wall of the esophagus with extraluminal gas posterior to the trachea. An urgent OGD was performed and an L-shaped fish bone was removed successfully and an endoclip was applied to close the puncture hole of esophagus. Patient made a full recovery without any mediastinal infection. Conclusion Odynophagia from mid esophageal ulcers secondary to doxycycline intake should be recognized and can be easily managed by stopping the antibiotics with complete resolution of the symptom. Fish ingestion leading to sharp bone induced penetrating esophageal injury can be safely managed by endoscopic removal and endoclip application. Disclosure All authors have declared no conflicts of interest.


2012 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Lykes ◽  
Erin McDonald ◽  
Cesar Boc

As the number of immigrants in the United States has increased dramatically in recent decades, so has the number of human rights violations against immigrants in the form of arrests without warrants, detention and deportation of parents without consideration of the well-being of their children, and incarceration without bail or the right to a public attorney. The Post-Deportation Human Rights Project (PDHRP) at Boston College was developed to investigate and respond to the legal and psychological effects of deportation policies on migrants living in or deported from the United States. This unique multidisciplinary project involves lawyers, social science faculty, and graduate students—all of whom are bilingual, one of whom is trilingual, and many of whom are bicultural—working together in partnership with local immigrant organizations to address the psychosocial impact of deportation on Latino and Maya families and communities. Our work includes psycho-educational and rights education workshops with immigrant parents and their children in southern New England as well as a cross-national project based in the U.S. and Guatemala supporting transnational families through participatory research, educational workshops, and legal resources.


PLoS ONE ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (6) ◽  
pp. e0252551
Author(s):  
Emily Rickard ◽  
Piotr Ozieranski

Our objective was to examine conflicts of interest between the UK’s health-focused All-Party Parliamentary Groups (APPGs) and the pharmaceutical industry between 2012 and 2018. APPGs are informal cross-party groups revolving around a particular topic run by and for Members of the UK’s Houses of Commons and Lords. They facilitate engagement between parliamentarians and external organisations, disseminate knowledge, and generate debate through meetings, publications, and events. We identified APPGs focusing on physical or mental health, wellbeing, health care, or treatment and extracted details of their payments from external donors disclosed on the Register for All-Party Parliamentary Groups. We identified all donors which were pharmaceutical companies and pharmaceutical industry-funded patient organisations. We established that sixteen of 146 (11%) health-related APPGs had conflicts of interest indicated by reporting payments from thirty-five pharmaceutical companies worth £1,211,345.81 (16.6% of the £7,283,414.90 received by all health-related APPGs). Two APPGs (Health and Cancer) received more than half of the total value provided by drug companies. Fifty APPGs also had received payments from patient organisations with conflicts of interest, indicated by reporting 304 payments worth £986,054.94 from 57 (of 84) patient organisations which had received £27,883,556.3 from pharmaceutical companies across the same period. In total, drug companies and drug industry-funded patient organisations provided a combined total of £2,197,400.75 (30.2% of all funding received by health-related APPGs) and 468 (of 1,177–39.7%) payments to 58 (of 146–39.7%) health-related APPGs, with the APPG for Cancer receiving the most funding. In conclusion, we found evidence of conflicts of interests through APPGs receiving substantial income from pharmaceutical companies. Policy influence exerted by the pharmaceutical industry needs to be examined holistically, with an emphasis on relationships between actors potentially playing part in its lobbying campaigns. We also suggest ways of improving transparency of payment reporting by APPGs and pharmaceutical companies.


2020 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shasha An ◽  
Peng Zhou ◽  
Stephen Crain

A recent theory provides a unified cross-linguistic analysis of the interpretations that are assigned to expressions for disjunction, Negative Polarity Items, Free Choice Items, and the non-interrogative uses of wh-phrases in languages such as Mandarin Chinese. If this approach is on the right track, children should be expected to demonstrate similar patterns in the acquisition of these linguistic expressions. Previous research has found that, by age four, children have acquired the knowledge that both the existential indefinite renhe “any” and wh-words in Mandarin Chinese are interpreted as Negative Polarity Items when they are bound by downward entailing operators, but the same expressions are interpreted as Free Choice Items (with a conjunctive interpretation) when they are bound by deontic modals (Mandarin keyi) or by the Mandarin adverbial quantifier dou “all”. The present study extends this line of research to the Mandarin disjunction word huozhe. A Truth Value Judgment Task was used to investigate the possibility that disjunction phrases that are bound by the adverbial quantifier dou generate a conjunctive interpretation in the grammars of Mandarin-speaking 4-year-old children. The findings confirmed this prediction. We discuss the implications of the findings for linguistic theory and for language learnability.


Percurso ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (30) ◽  
pp. 91
Author(s):  
Valmir César POZZETTI ◽  
André Fregapani LEITE ◽  
Ana Carolina LUCENA

RESUMO Esta pesquisa teve como objetivo geral analisar os critérios utilizados para aprovação dos incentivos fiscais as empresas produtoras de agrotóxicos, como objetivo específico analisar quais são os incentivos fiscais concedidos ás empresas produtoras de agrotóxicos, qual o processo e critérios para aprovação destes, verificar o atual cenário e quais as políticas públicas estão sendo implementadas, se o direito à alimentação saudável está sendo obeservado de acordo com a legislação vigente e agências fiscalizadoras, qual a repercussão do uso dos agrotóxicos no meio ambiente, nas lavouras, e quais as consequências do uso dos agrotóxicos na sáude da população. A metodologia utilizada nesta pesquisa foi o método dedutivo; quanto aos meios foi desenvolvida através do método dedutivo/descritivo; quanto aos meios a análise foi a bibliográfica, com uso da doutrina, legislação e jurisprudencia. Quanto aos fins, a pesquisa foi qualitativa. Conclui-se que os incetivos fiscais à produção de agrotóxicos são injustificáveis, uma vez que a concessão desses benefícios não seguem critérios objetivos; que existe uma verdadeira relação feudal do Estado brasileiro e as empresas transnacionais produtoras de agrotóxicos; que o agronegócio brasileiro é totalmente depedente do uso desses produtos, criando uma relação servil; que o discurso utilizado para a concessão dos benefícios fiscais é de que o agrotóxico aumenta a produção agrícola gerando emprego e desenvolvimento econômico, mas as políticas públicas no que tange aos agrotóxicos, são dúbias e obscuras, não há transparência na concessão dos benefícios e nem quais são as empresas contempladas; que a falta de critérios objetivos traz prejuízos a economia brasileira, pois há redução nas receitas tributárias, recursos esses, que poderiam ser investidos em outras áreas, aumentando a margem de lucro das empresas; que os incentivos criam competição desleal entre os alimentos naturais e os cultivados com agrotóxicos, além de contaminar o meio ambiente, trabalhadores rurais e a população de forma indireta; que a concessão de incentivos não possui como critério a exigência da não produção de externalidades negativas que o Estado terá que arcar pelo uso indiscriminado e prolongado dos agrotóxicos. Concluiu-se que é necessário a imposição de critérios para a utilização dos agrotóxicos, transparência no processo de contemplação de isenções, valorização dos alimentos naturais e agricultura familiar, informando a população dos malefícios dos agrotóxicos, e a quebra do paradigma de dependência dos agrotóxicos.PALAVRAS-CHAVES: Agrotóxicos; Incentivos fiscais; Empresas.ABSTRACTThe objective of this research is to analyze the criteria used to approve tax incentives for agrochemical companies, as a specific objective to analyze the tax incentives granted to companies, the process and criteria for approval of pesticides, to verify the current scenario and which public policies are being implemented, whether the right to healthy food is being observed in accordance with current legislation and enforcement agencies, what is the repercussion of the use of pesticides on the environment, on crops, and what are the consequences of the use of pesticides in health of the population. The methodology used in this research regarding the means was developed through the deductive, descriptive and qualitative method, through the doctrinal, bibliographical and jurisprudential analysis. As for the purposes, the research was qualitative. It is concluded that tax incentives are unjustifiable, since the concession of these benefits do not follow objective criteria, there is a true feudal relation of the Brazilian State and the transnational companies producing agrochemicals, the Brazilian agribusiness is totally dependent on the use of these chemicals, this dependence creates a true slavish relationship, the discourse used to grant tax benefits is that agrotoxicology increases agricultural production by generating jobs and economic development, but public policies regarding pesticides are dubious and obscure, there is no transparency in the the lack of objective criteria is detrimental to the Brazilian economy, since there is a reduction in tax revenues, money that could be invested in other areas, increase the profit margin of companies, creates unfair competition between food and contamination of the environment, rural workers and the population in an indirect way, and the negative externalities that the State will have to pay for the indiscriminate and prolonged use of agrochemicals do not enter into the criteria for granting fiscal benefits. The solution will be to change criteria for the use of pesticides, transparency in the process of contemplating exemptions, valuation of natural foods and family farming, informing the population of the harmful effects of pesticides, and breaking the paradigm of dependence on agrochemicals.KEYWORDS: Agrochemicals; companies; tax incentives.


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