Legal issues surrounding public health emergencies

Building evidence for legal decision making in real time: legal triage in public health emergencies.

Similar to the triaging of patients by health care workers, legal and public health professionals must prioritize and respond to issues of law and ethics in declared public health emergencies. As revealed by the 2009-2010 H1N1 influenza outbreak and other events, there are considerable inconsistencies among professionals regarding how to best approach these issues during a public health emergen...

Xenotransplantation and public health: identifying the legal issues.

The debate over the acceptability of clinical trials for xenotransplantation has focussed primarily on analyses of: 1) the medical benefits that might accrue to individual patients in need of organ replacement therapy; 2) the risk of introducing new infectious disease(s) into the population; and 3) the ability of public safety measures to minimize that risk. It is now generally accepted that if...

Public health emergencies: What Counts?

Legal issues surrounding privately funded research cause furore in Toronto.

Toronto physician Miriam Shuchman has spent the last 4 months tracking the research issues surrounding a controversial clinical trial conducted in Toronto. Much of the information appearing in this article was gathered while she was preparing a segment for the CBC Radio program Quirks and Quarks. Earlier, she had reported on similar issues in the US for the Annals of Internal Medicine.

Legal Issues Surrounding Monitoring During Network Research (Invited Paper)

This work was motivated by a discussion that two of the coauthors (computer science professors) had with the other coauthor (a law professor and a former computer crime Trial Attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice), in which it was pointed out that some of the network measurements that the computer scientists were thinking of making might potentially violate Federal laws. Several Federal la...