Public attitudes to xenotransplantation: A national survey in the United States.

Xenotransplantation (XTx) presents a potential clinical alternative to the shortage of human organs for transplantation. Before clinical trials occur in the United States, public assessments are crucial to understand potential barriers to acceptance. The purpose of this study was to explore barriers and identify characteristics associated with attitudes toward XTx.

Public perceptions of US for-profit, nonprofit, and public hospitals.

Nonprofit hospitals have been criticized for behaving like for-profit hospitals. One prominent defense of nonprofit hospitals is contract failure theory, which suggests that nonprofits are important in markets defined by information asymmetries. Unlike for-profits, nonprofit hospitals' inability to distribute profits may provide patients with an important assurance that they will not be exploited in the course of receiving care.

Examining the Ethics and Impacts of Laws Restricting Transgender Youth-Athlete Participation.

As of this writing, twenty-one states have passed laws barring transgender youth-athletes from competing on public-school sports teams in accordance with their gender identity. Proponents of these regulations claim that transgender females in particular have inherent physiological advantages that threaten a "level playing field" for their cisgender competitors. Existing evidence is limited but does not support these restrictions.

What HIRTS athletes? Establishing a unified public policy understanding of Head Impact-Related Trauma in Sport.

Globally, concussions in sport now attract far greater concern than several decades ago. Yet, no international scientific consensus exists for defining 'concussion,' or for determining how many brain injuries caused by a contact sport constitute a sufficient public health threat to warrant improving policies. How can policymakers help coaches, players, and parents work with public health authorities and clinicians to identify concussions, and prevent and treat head injuries? Doing so will require language that helps distinguish among the multitude of conditions related to Head Impact-Related Trauma in Sport (HIRTS), including sport-related concussion, post-concussion syndrome, second impact syndrome, and neurodegenerative diseases such as chronic traumatic encephalopathy.

Adverse event management in mass drug administration for neglected tropical diseases.

The ethical challenges of reporting and managing adverse events (AEs) and serious AEs (SAEs) in the context of mass drug administration (MDA) for the treatment of neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) require reassessment of domestic and international policies on a global scale. Although the World Health Organization has set forth AE/SAE guidelines specifically for NTD MDA that incorporate suspected causality, and recommends that only SAEs get reported in this setting, most regulatory agencies continue to require the reporting of all SAEs exhibiting even a merely temporal relationship to activities associated with an MDA program. This greatly increases the potential for excess "noise" and undue risk aversion and is not only impractical but arguably unethical where huge proportions of populations are being treated for devastating diseases, and no good baseline exists against which to compare possible AE/SAE reports.