Public health ethics and obesity prevention: the trouble with data and ethics

What healthcare professionals owe us: why their duty to treat during a pandemic is contingent on personal protective equipment (PPE)

Healthcare professionals' capacity to protect themselves, while caring for infected patients during an infectious disease pandemic, depends on their ability to practise universal precautions. In turn, universal precautions rely on the availability of personal protective equipment (PPE). During the SARS-CoV2 outbreak many healthcare workers across the globe have been reluctant to provide patient care because crucial PPE components are in short supply. The lack of such equipment during the pandemic was not a result of careful resource allocation decisions in the global north, where the short supply could be explained through their high cost. Instead, they were the result of democratically elected governments prioritising low tax regimes over an adequate resourcing of their healthcare delivery systems. Such decisions were made despite global health experts warning about the high probability of pandemics like SARS-CoV2 occurring during our lifetimes. Avoidable allocation decisions by democratically elected political leaders resulted in a lack of sufficient PPE for healthcare professionals. After discussing and discounting various ethical arguments in support of a professional obligation to treat, even without or with suboptimal PPE, I conclude that these policy decisions were sufficiently grave that they provide a sound ethical rationale to justify healthcare workers' refusal to provide care to infected patients.

Popular three-dimensional models: Advantages for cancer, Alzheimer's and cardiovascular diseases

The increasing prevalence of non-communicable diseases, namely cancer, Alzheimer's (AD) and cardiovascular diseases (CVDs), worldwide continues to be a major health burden. Research attempts have been made to understand the pathophysiology and develop effective therapeutic agents for these diseases using conventional in vitro and ex vivo models. Due to the complexity of human disease mechanisms, often these models fail to recapitulate clinically relevant pathologies. As such, interests are arising in the exploration of three-dimensional (3D) in-vitro models, which create an artificial environment to closely mimic in vivo human conditions. Several studies have developed 3D models for cancer, AD and CVD research which can greatly improve the understanding of biological mechanisms and mirror clinical drug activities. Thus, 3D cultures may provide new in-vitro models that recapitulate the architecture and biological mechanisms of human diseases prior to the need for the use of sentient animals.