health – Page 4 – The Daily Opinion

Ethicists Propose After-birth Abortion

Opinions on abortion are still divided and the topic causes heated debates from time to time, not least during the Presidential campaigns when hopeful candidates speak of their personal outlooks. Yet if the termination of an unborn child with no consciousness is not divisive enough, two ethicists working with Australian universities claim in the Journal of Medical Ethics that “after-birth abortion” should be permissible from an ethical standpoint.

After-birth abortion, once the name has been peeled back, simply means murder, although the two ethicists in question, Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva, prefer the term to murder or infanticide because it emphasises “that the moral status of the individual killed is comparable with that of a fetus”. Also rejected is the term euthanasia, because the reason for the killing may not be because of the child’s best interests, but those of the parents.

Part of the controversy regarding abortion is deciding at what point the termination should be allowed, with current rulings settling at 24 weeks. After-birth abortion would necessitate extremely grueling, confusing and rigorous rules to determine an acceptable case, and Giunilini and Minerva state that it will be acceptable in such instances as putting the well-being or life of the family at risk, and consider Downs Syndrome as a good example because “such children might be an unbearable burden on the family and on society as a whole, when the state economically provides for their care.” Ultimately this would mean that any newborn that puts a psychological, social or economical burden on parent or society could be subjected to an after-birth abortion. The potential risk should this ever become law is setting the stage for eugenics, where, hypothetically, new criteria could be set for an ‘acceptable’ human being and anything less than that would be considered a burden on the family or society. This would be less likely if the decision relied solely on the parents, but if societal burdens were brought into the equation then the possibility of state interference could not be ruled out.

According to the authors, after-birth abortion is morally acceptable because newborn babies are not people in the “morally relevant sense” but instead are “potential persons” because to be considered a person, in their opinion, means being “an individual who is capable of attributing to her own existence some (at least) basic value such that being deprived of this existence represents a loss to her.” However, this viewpoint does not seem to touch upon how a child with perfect mental capacity – that would understand its existence – but a physical condition that would burden the family or society would fit into the suggestion of after-birth abortion. Essentially, Giubilini and Minerva are asserting that, from an ethical standpoint, newborn children should not be considered actual persons anymore than a 23-week-old fetus is, despite the state of consciousness that a born child has. This is highlighted in their defence of after-birth abortion that “merely potential people cannot be harmed by not being brought into existence,” although they make no attempt to define at what age someone is considered an “actual” person.

For many, this idea would seem abhorrent. Yet there is the case of at least one woman that may confuse the issue because she wishes her son had never been born. Not for reasons of not loving her child, but because his condition will not only kill him in the near future and causes intense suffering for the child and his family while he is alive. In other words, this is the sort of scenario Giubilini and Minerva were likely thinking of in their paper.

Emily Rapp is the woman in question, and her son Ronan, who is nearly two, suffers from the progressive genetic disorder Tay-Sachs disease. Although still alive, Ronan is paralysed and blind as a result of the disease. His mother says that had she been aware during her pregnancy that her son would suffer daily seizures and be paralysed to such a degree that he cannot even swallow, she would have saved him the pain and suffering and opted for an abortion – but his condition went undetected. Emily Rapp stressed that while she would have had an abortion, it “would have been a different kind of loss to mourn and would by no means have been a cavalier or uncomplicated, heartless decision.” She also goes to great lengths to ensure people know her words are not borne out of a lack of love for her son, but rather her love for him is so great she wants to spare him the pain – to the point that she would live without him: “I’m so grateful that Ronan is my child. I also wish he’d never been born; no person should suffer in this way…with no hope for a cure. Both of these statements are categorically true; neither one is mutually exclusive…I love Ronan, and I believe it would have been an act of love to abort him, knowing that his life would be primarily one of intense suffering, knowing that his neurologically devastated brain made true quality of life…impossible.”

It goes without saying of course that wishing you had undergone an abortion in hindsight and killing a child you can physically hold in your arms are not the same thing, but does a real-life example of a parent who sees the suffering in her child’s life and a degree of kindness in termination blur the lines of morality enough to make after-birth abortion an acceptable idea? Or is it the case that it opens too many possibilities for abuse; that people suffer at any age and we need to just accept that is how life is?

Accept the Damn Organ!

Anti-rejection drugs, which are used when an organ transplant is completed, may go out of use with a newly-discovered cellular principle. Hooray!

In the past, when one accepted an organ it was a hassle to get the body to accept it. So the patient would have to take immunosuppressive drugs to keep the organ from being rejected. But the problem with this was that the drugs would either have horrible side-effects or would just stop working. And this is all before we get to the price which Suzanne Ildstadthe, Director for the Institute for Cellular Therapeutics at the University of Louisville in Kentucky, outlines as roughly $25,000 per year in the US.

Now, this is clearly due to the fact that the US operates a terrible health care system where only the rich can afford the necessary treatment, but even in the UK this would still cost the NHS a massive amount of money; and all of this is paid for by us through our taxes.

The trial discovered this involved taking a number of patients and reducing a great many of their immune cells, which was done through radiation and chemotherapy. They then implanted the donated organ, from a genetically mismatched donor, and then implemented bone marrow alongside the organ. The hope was that because bone marrow can produce immune cells from the donor’s genetic code and the patient’s genetic code would “blend” so the chance of organ rejection would be significantly reduced. In this test it was all about testing kidney transplantation.

The study published in the journal Science Translational Medicine demonstrated that 7 out of 10 patients used in this trial could be successfully taken off of immunosuppressive drugs. This is great, right?

Well, for the most part this is great. The only issue with this way of transplanting organs is that it still retains the patient’s chances of suffering from graft-versus-host disease, or GVHD as the disease is most commonly known.

GVHD is where the donor’s immune cells actually attack the body it’s being placed in, like if you dropped a group of chavs into another city whilst they were sleeping; hey, they are simplistic, they can’t help it. However, another study did show that the removal of these cells which were likely to cause GVHD did help in preventing the disease. The only problem is that the results of the study were considered to be inconclusive in the long-term because GVHD can appear years later.

Placing this in an overall perspective, essentially what we have done here is replaced another human’s immune system. If we can successfully replace parts of human beings on a cellular level then who knows what this could lead to in the future?

Yes, it would mean that thousands of patients wouldn’t be waiting on hospital beds until a successful donor could be found, but it could mean the death of many more ailments. If undifferentiated cells, from bone marrow, can be successfully differentiated into cells of the scientist’s choice then we could eliminate things like deafness, blindness, and maybe even learn to regenerate entire limbs.

The only issue with all of this is when we eventually ascend to this scientific plane we may even be getting close to the concept of immortality as everybody’s lifespan starts to reach the 100 mark. Of course, none of this is likely to appear in our lifetimes, but the future of science after we are gone is certainly very bright.

Do Children Who Snore Equal the Signs of a Little Bastard?

Why are some children just bad? This is a question which has followed society for hundreds and hundreds of years. And, despite the advances in science and technology, we still have no idea why some children who come from seemingly good homes have to act out on a consistent basis.

But a study which was published in the scientific journal Pediatrics believes there may be some visible signs involved. The study claims to have found a link between behavioural issues in children and sleep-disordered breathing; sleep-disordered breathing is defined as apnoea in this case.

The study was carried out at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York and followed over 13,000 children from infancy through their early childhood.

The study originally found that 45% of this group remained free of any sleep-disordered breathing. 8% of children fell into a worst-case group, which involved children who had breathing problems which persisted after the ages of two and three; a group dubbed by the researchers involved in the project.

By age seven, the research team discovered that those with so-called sleep-disordered breathing were more likely to develop some form of behavioural or emotional disorder by age seven. These disorders included anything from ADHD disorder to anxiety and depression. This link was discovered because 13.5% of children had these kinds of symptoms, as opposed to only 8% of children who had no sleep-disordered breathing problems.

But here’s where the problems with this study arrive. The researchers admitted that they weren’t sure about whether any of these children actually had these disorders out rightly or not because the results are based off of questionnaires given to parents. Now isn’t that a reliable way to gain results? Obviously, it’s not which already leads to much scrutiny.

Ok, so they claimed that they accounted this link by using variables such as parental income, education, race, birth weight, and whether parents smoked. This is all well and good, but did it take into account how much a parent smoked or exactly how much the parent weighed? Of course it didn’t. So, these figures are already looking very sketchy already. And this is before we get into the fact that people who smoke already underestimate exactly how much they smoke.

Continuing on, the researchers went on to say that even with these variables they discovered that sleep-disordered breathing was the biggest factor involved as the researchers plucked out a figure which said that there was a 72% chance of behavioural or emotional symptoms in children at age seven.

Now, this seems like they just pulled this figure out of nothing because if 45% of children didn’t have any breathing problems whilst sleeping then that means 55% did. If 55% did and only 13.5% of these children had any of these behavioural or emotional issues by age seven then where is the 72% figure coming from? Luck?

And let’s look at the figures they gained from sleep-disordered children versus children who had no issues when it comes to any symptoms and issues when they got older. 13.5% and 8% are incredibly close to each other as a 4.5% difference in a study of 13,000 is marginal, to say the least. If another 13,000 study was conducted then would these figures necessarily be the same? I think not, but if they are then I would be surprised.

For now, this writer will be blaming bad parenting and poor discipline when a child decides that it would be funny to throw a brick at another child’s head.

Last Ice Age Didn’t Wipe Out All Vegetation After All?

In the last Ice Age it was thought that all of the existing vegetation at the time of the massive ice sheets had been wiped out by the freezing temperatures and excessive pressure caused by the sheets themselves. But scientists have shown that some vegetation did survive in Scandinavia, which challenges this long-held scientific “truth”.

Originally, modern Scandinavian trees were thought to have arrived when some of the southern species of tree migrated north after the ice age, which was about 9,000 years ago. However, research published in the Science Mag science journal has shown that some conifers survived the ice age by existing on large peaks above the ice or on islands and on the coast.

Professor Eske Willerslev of the Centre for GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen reported that the species survived in small pockets which the ice couldn’t touch, before spreading outwards after the ice melted. But how did they survive in the ice, how did they find the room and shelter needed to stay alive amongst the fraught surroundings?

The answer is nunataks. Nunataks are common in glacial regions and pop out of the ice like a tiny island. They don’t have any ice or snow within its structure, or on the edges of it, which makes them the perfect place for a plant to grow and survive.

To find these results, the researchers used the DNA of two types of modern plant and the composition of the plants in the sediments of lake-core samples; yes, this is incredibly complicated. But to explain it in English, they compared the DNA of the old and the DNA of the new to see how much they matched up. If they were the same, or incredibly similar, then that means they are probably the same species.

However, the only issue with this theory is that modern nunataks in Greenland don’t have any plants growing on them, so how could this have happened in the age of ice? Of course, this doesn’t attack the fact that they have discovered that certain species around today may have existed before the Ice Age, but it does attack their theory as to why.

On a side note, this is why we have to love science because something which has stood as fact for so long has now been challenged. It sure as hell beats other fields of study where most things tend to stay the same all the time.

What do you think about these new findings, and how do you think these plants survived the Ice Age?

Save the Spotted Owl! With Mr. Chainsaw and Mrs. Shotgun…

Yes, you did read the title correctly. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) have now turned their attentions to the plight of the Northern spotted owl, which resides in the woods and forests of the Pacific Northwest. Current proposals include shooting competing owls and chopping down trees with cuddly old Mr. Chainsaw.

The proposals come in response to the figures showing that since the owl was made an endangered species in 1990 spotted owl numbers have decreased by an average of 3% each year. Ok, now this is something which clearly needs to be looked at, especially since the rival barred owls invaded its ancestral territories.

These proposals have emerged from a report the FWS conducted into the plight of the owl in the summer of 2011. In this case, the FWS have submitted some sensible proposals like the idea to increase the owl’s protected habitat by around 2.2 million hectares.

However, what has caused some controversy is the battle over deforestation as FWS director Daniel Ashe suggested that fire-prone forests should be logged to protect the landscape. The problem with this is that exactly how fire-prone does a forest have to be to be logged? Most forests are technically prone to fire, but if we have a forest which has stood for a generation without any problems then should we be logging that? Of course we shouldn’t.

Overall, the idea of logging fire-prone forests in the vain hope that it will help encourage the growth of the spotted owl is a slippery slope as taking the decision to cut down trees which take years and years to grow should not be taken lightly.

Also, let’s take a look at a pertinent point made by Ecologist Dominick DellaSala, director of the Geos Institute in Ashland, Oregon, who made the interesting point that this proposal by the FWS is untested. This proposal has never had any studies conducted, large or small, so are we just going to chop down the trees and pray it works? That’s not science, that’s idiocy.

The other proposal was to simply remove the barred owls from the territories. This would be a sensible decision if the owls are having a negative impact on the spotted owls, but are they really? Even Daniel Ashe of the FWS conceded that it would be at least a decade into the experiment before this could be discovered at all, and this is what makes you wonder whether it’s really a good idea at all.

So they want to either shoot or relocate the barred owls to boost the spotted owl population, despite the fact that they don’t know if this will help at all? Essentially, they are saying let’s give another species of owl a good kicking as an experiment to see if it will help. That’s not right at all. Relocate them, maybe, but don’t shoot them.

The question they should also be asking is why are the Barred owls there? Why have they moved out of their own territories? If the answer is overpopulation due to the fact that they have grown too much then, yes, the population may need to be culled. But if the population has been reduced because you destroyed their homes, then that’s your fault and you should be removing the logging companies and creating an area where they can flourish without having to damage other species.

The public do have 90 days to submit their comments, but what do you think should be done when an endangered species’ territory has been invaded by another species which has become displaced somehow?

Alcohol on the Big Screen Encourages Binge Drinking (apparently)

It was suggested in a US study, published in online journal BMJ Open, on the 21^st of February that actors who drink on the big screen are encouraging experimentation with alcohol amongst children.

The study says that the stars act as successful role models who encourage children to drink. The thinking goes that if a child looks at a famous actor and they are drinking heavily then it’s ok because they have already made themselves famous and they don’t look like they are suffering from health problems.

This study was unprecedented in the number of test subjects as it randomly selected more than 6,500 American children between the ages of 10 and 14 for a phone interview, and then another three additional interviews in the next two years. Obviously, they would have had an issue getting through to some children as their parents were too drunk to answer the phone at the time (hint hint).

The questions asked ranged from which movies they had seen, whether they currently drank or had drunk alcohol in the past, and whether they owned any merchandise which had any alcoholic brands attached to it. Of course, they were also asked about their school and home lives in general too.

The films used to compare the implied and actual consumption of alcohol by researchers were taken from films which had grossed at least $15,000,000 when the interviews had first started. After that the researchers then used the character’s implied and actual consumption and purchases of alcohol to find out the results.

The researchers found that youngsters, on average, had been exposed to roughly four to eight hours of viewing involving alcohol from the most popular films on the market. Other items of interest from the survey also showed that during the two year study, the number of respondents who admitted they had started drinking alcohol had risen from 11% at the start to 25% by the end of it.

Furthermore, the number of binge drinkers tripled from 4% to 13% by the end of the study; binge drinking, as outlined in this study, is having at least five drinks in a row.

Ok, these are startling figures as they do eclipse the figures gained from having bad parents, having lots of money, and a rebellious teen spirit. But can’t we see one fatal flaw in this experiment? How exactly do you isolate this one specific factor?

How are you going to isolate this one specific factor, which is alcohol in movies, without putting the kids in a room on their own? The answer is you can’t. So how can these figures really be that reliable? The answer is they can’t as they are also going to be exposed to a number of different factors at the same time; such as peer pressure, rebellion, and coming into money.

And let’s go further and make the point that a phone survey is just a phone survey. None of the test subjects were ever met in person so how can you be sure they are telling the truth? And when someone talks about alcohol we all know that people significantly underestimate how much they really drink, don’t we?

But let’s look at children. Children are always being told how bad it is to drink underage, which is against the law. So realistically how many of them are going to readily admit it? How do you know that some of the test subjects are not claiming they don’t drink when they really do? If they did this would further support the study’s conclusion, but it’s important just to bring up the point anyway.

Nonetheless, what we can expect from the findings of this study is that they will either slink away from the publix gaze into the darkness after a week or so or it will cause panic throughout America and parents will be covering their children’s eyes and protesting for the removal of all alcohol from films. Sooner or later we are going to end up living in a world where alcohol can’t be seen on TV, can’t be talked about on the radio, can’t have colourful packaging, and can only be drunk within the basement of one’s own home, when the child is at school.

So it’s either going to be a giant overreaction or completely ignored, what do you think?