Modeling geographic vaccination strategies for COVID-19 in Norway.

Vaccination was a key intervention in controlling the COVID-19 pandemic globally. In early 2021, Norway faced significant regional variations in COVID-19 incidence and prevalence, with large differences in population density, necessitating efficient vaccine allocation to reduce infections and severe outcomes. This study explored alternative vaccination strategies to minimize health outcomes (infections, hospitalizations, ICU admissions, deaths) by varying regions prioritized, extra doses prioritized, and implementation start time.

Can Geographically Targeted Vaccinations Be Ethically Justified? The Case of Norway During the COVID-19 Pandemic.

This article discusses the fairness of geographically targeted vaccinations (GTVs). During the initial period of local and global vaccine scarcity, health authorities had to enact priority-setting strategies for mass vaccination campaigns against COVID-19. These strategies have in common that priority setting was based on personal characteristics, such as age, health status or profession.

Antimicrobial Resistance Policy Protagonists and Processes-A Qualitative Study of Policy Advocacy and Implementation.

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) fundamentally weakens societal foundations economically and in health care. The development of well-considered policies against AMR is important. However, in many places, AMR policy implementation remains elusive.

A Comparison Between Computer-Assisted Self-Triage by Patients and Triage Performed by Nurses in the Emergency Department.

Background and objective Emergency departments (EDs) often find the number of arriving patients exceeding their capacity and find it difficult to triage them in a timely manner. The potential risk to the safety of patients awaiting assessment by a triage professional has led some hospitals to consider implementing patient self-triage, such as using kiosks. Published studies about patient self-triage are scarce and information about patients' ability to accurately assess the acuity of their condition or predict their need to be hospitalized is limited.

National action to combat AMR: a One-Health approach to assess policy priorities in action plans.

Little is known about the overall trend and prioritisations of past and current antimicrobial resistance (AMR) policies. Here we introduce a quantitative method to analyse AMR policies. The AMR-Policy Analysis Coding Toolkit (AMR-PACT) uses several categorical variables.

Evaluating the risks of public health programs: Rational antibiotic use and antimicrobial resistance.

Existing ethical frameworks for public health provide insufficient guidance on how to evaluate the risks of public health programs that compromise the best clinical interests of present patients for the benefit of others. Given the relevant similarity of such programs to clinical research, we suggest that insights from the long-standing debate about acceptable risk in clinical research can helpfully inform and guide the evaluation of risks posed by public health programs that compromise patients' best clinical interests. We discuss how lessons learned regarding the ethics of risk in one context can be fruitfully transferred to the other, using the example of a so-called 'rational antibiotic use' guideline that limits antimicrobial prescribing in order to curb antimicrobial resistance.

[Rational use of antibiotics as an ethical challenge].

Antibiotics resistance presents one of the major challenges for health care in the twenty-first century. This paper examines the ethical problems that arise as a result of antibiotic resistance. Two main categories of ethical problems in infectious disease control are distinguished: those that are exacerbated by antibiotics resistance, and those that are a direct result of antibiotics resistance.

Tackling anti-microbial resistance: ethical framework for rational antibiotic use.

Background: To reduce the effect of antimicrobial resistance and to preserve antibiotic effectiveness, clinical guidelines and health policy documents call for the rational use of antibiotics, which aims to reduce unnecessary or minimally effective antibiotic use.

Methods: Through ethical analysis, we show that rational use programmes can lead to ethical conflicts, because they sometimes place patients at risk of harm-for example, a delayed switch to second-line antibiotics for community-acquired pneumonia can lead to substantial increases in mortality.

Results: Implementing the rational use of antibiotics can lead to conflicts between promoting patients' clinical interests and preserving antibiotic effectiveness for future use.

Antimicrobial resistance-a threat to the world's sustainable development.

This commentary examines how specific sustainable development goals (SDGs) are affected by antimicrobial resistance and suggests how the issue can be better integrated into international policy processes. Moving beyond the importance of effective antibiotics for the treatment of acute infections and health care generally, we discuss how antimicrobial resistance also impacts on environmental, social, and economic targets in the SDG framework. The paper stresses the need for greater international collaboration and accountability distribution, and suggests steps towards a broader engagement of countries and United Nations agencies to foster global intersectoral action on antimicrobial resistance.

Exploring the evidence base for national and regional policy interventions to combat resistance.

The effectiveness of existing policies to control antimicrobial resistance is not yet fully understood. A strengthened evidence base is needed to inform effective policy interventions across countries with different income levels and the human health and animal sectors. We examine three policy domains-responsible use, surveillance, and infection prevention and control-and consider which will be the most effective at national and regional levels.

Is Antimicrobial Resistance a Slowly Emerging Disaster?

The problem of antimicrobial resistance is so dire that people are predicting that the era of antibiotics may be coming to an end, ushering in a 'post-antibiotic' era. A comprehensive policy response is therefore urgently needed. A part of this response will require framing the problem in such a way that adequately reflects its nature as well as encompassing an approach that has the best prospect of success.

The Ethical Significance of Antimicrobial Resistance.

In this paper, we provide a state-of-the-art overview of the ethical challenges that arise in the context of antimicrobial resistance (AMR), which includes an introduction to the contributions to the symposium in this issue. We begin by discussing why AMR is a distinct ethical issue, and should not be viewed purely as a technical or medical problem. In the second section, we expand on some of these arguments and argue that AMR presents us with a broad range of ethical problems that must be addressed as part of a successful policy response to emerging drug resistance.

Antibiotic resistance: An ethical challenge.

In this paper, we argue that antibiotic resistance (ABR) raises a number of ethical problems that have not yet been sufficiently addressed. We outline four areas in which ethical issues that arise in relation to ABR are particularly pressing. First, the emergence of multidrug-resistant and extensively drug-resistant infections exacerbates traditional ethical challenges of infectious disease control, such as the restriction of individual liberty for the protection of the public's health.

How high is a high risk? Prioritising high-risk individuals in an influenza pandemic.

Pandemic contingency plans frequently define priority groups that are given preferential access to influenza vaccine. One of the most commonly named groups for prioritisation is that of high-risk individuals. However, current models of categorisation are unsatisfactory in a number of ways.

Lack of proportionality. Seven specifications of public interest that override post-approval commercial interests on limited access to clinical data.

For the protection of commercial interests, licensing bodies such as the EMA and health technology assessment institutions such as NICE restrict full access to unpublished evidence. Their respective policies on data transparency, however, lack a systematic account of (1) what kinds of commercial interests remain relevant after market approval has been granted, (2) what the specific types of public interest are that may override these commercial interests post approval, and, most importantly, (3) what criteria guide the trade-off between public interest and legitimate measures for the protection of commercial interest. Comparing potential commercial interests with seven specifications of relevant public interest reveals the lack of proportionality inherent in the current practices of EMA and NICE.