Public health policies designed to improve individual and population health may involve coercion. These coercive policies require ethical justification, and yet it is unclear in the public health ethics literature which ethical concepts might justify coercion, and what their limitations are in applying across contexts. In this paper, we analyse a number of concepts from Western bioethics, including the harm principle, paternalism, the public interest, and a duty of easy rescue.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Neutrophils play a complex and important role in the immunopathology of TB. Data suggest they are protective during early infection but become a main driver of immunopathology if infection progresses to active disease. Neutrophils are now recognized to exist in functionally diverse states, but little work has been done on how neutrophil states or subsets are skewed in TB disease.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUnderrepresentation of women in scientific leadership is a global problem. To understand and counter narratives that limit gender equity in African science, we conducted a public engagement campaign. Scientists representing six sub-Saharan African countries and multiple career stages used superhero imagery to create a diverse and unified team advocating for gender equity in science.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTuberculosis remains a leading cause of death globally despite curative treatment, partly due to the difficulty of identifying patients who will not respond to therapy. Simple host biomarkers that correlate with response to drug treatment would facilitate improvement in outcomes and the evaluation of novel therapies. In a prospective longitudinal cohort study, we evaluated neutrophil count and phenotype at baseline, as well as during TB treatment in 79 patients [50 (63%) HIV-positive] with microbiologically confirmed drug susceptible TB undergoing standard treatment.
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