Vaccines currently recommended for adolescents by the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices have the potential to improve the health of youth by preventing conditions such as: tetanus, pertussis, meningococcal disease, influenza, and genital warts, as well as later adult outcomes such as cervical and other human papillomavirus-related cancers. Adolescent vaccine coverage lags behind that...

OBJECTIVE This paper brings together summarised findings and comment on surveys of young children undertaken in Scotland, Wales and England in 2007-08. These surveys are the latest in a series using common criteria for measurement but changes in the consent arrangements for Wales and England mean that these datasets are no longer directly comparable with Scottish data. METHOD Representative s...

The goal of this study is to describe the process of establishing a longitudinal cohort to study genetic, psychological, and social predictors of adolescent smoking. Parents of eligible adolescents were approached for their consent via mail. Seventy-two percent of parents (n = 1533 of 2120) provided a response regarding their teens' participation. Among those who provided a response, 75% (1151)...

The meaning of valid proxy consent for children has recently been the subject of an important debate between Richard McCormick and Paul Ramsey on the ethics of experimenting with children. Ramsey is willing to agree with McCormick that parental consent for a child to undergo some medical procedure is valid only if parents consider what the child would consent to if he could. But beyond this, Ra...

background the surgical informed consent (sic) is a comprehensive process that establishes an informationbased agreement between the patient and his doctor to undertake a clearly outlined medical or surgical intervention. it is neither a casual formality nor a casually signed piece of paper. the present study was designed to audit the current knowledge and attitudes of doctors towards sic at a ...

BACKGROUND Conducting clinical trials with pre-term or sick infants is important if care for this population is to be underpinned by sound evidence. Yet approaching parents at this difficult time raises challenges for the obtaining of valid informed consent to such research. This study asked: what light does the empirical literature cast on an ethically defensible approach to the obtaining of i...

Background and Aim: Permanent first molars (PFMs) are highly susceptible to caries due to their special anatomical form, early eruption, lack of awareness about their eruption and misidentifying them from the primary teeth. Parental awareness about the existence of PFMs in their children’s mouth could lead to caries prevention. This study aimed to determine the level of parental awareness about...

he ethical aspects of the use of stored tissue samples collected from minors are of topical interest. However, the views of professionals working in the field of genetics have not been investigated in depth anywhere. We conducted a survey among 194 such professionals in Belgium. This list was composed of the members of the High Council for Anthropogenetics, supplemented with all professionals w...

BACKGROUND This article investigated (1) parental response accuracy of fourth-grade children's school-meal participation and whether accuracy differed by children's body mass index (BMI), sex, and race, and (2) the relationship between BMI and school-meal participation (based on parental responses). METHODS Data were from four cross-sectional studies conducted from fall 1999 to spring 2003 wi...