Assessment of exposure to airborne endotoxins has been studied for several years, especially in occupational environments, but a large number of procedures are used for sampling and analysis. This lack of standardization makes it very difficult to compare results and set internationally accepted threshold limit values (TLVs) or occupational exposure limits (OELs) for endotoxin exposure. This pa...

The objective of this study was to examine how nurses experience ethical values as they are expressed in daily practice in a Norwegian hospital. A growing focus in Western healthcare on effectiveness, production, and retrenchment has an influence on professional nursing standards and nursing values. Lack of resources and subsequent ethically difficult prioritizations imply a strain on nurses. T...

Review boards responsible for vetting the ethical conduct of research have been criticised for their costliness, unreliability and inappropriate standards when evaluating some non-medical research, but the basic value of mandatory ethical review has not been questioned. When the standards that review boards use to evaluate research proposals are applied to review board practices, it is clear th...

The National Bioethics Advisory Commission has proposed that regulatory oversight for research with human subjects be extended beyond the protection of individual research participants to include the protection of social groups. To accomplish this, the commission recommends that investigators and ethics review boards a) work directly with community representatives to develop study methods that ...