Contemporary biomedical ethics and environmental ethics share a common ancestry in Aldo Leopold's and Van Rensselaer Potter's initial broad visions of a connected biosphere. Over the past five ...decades, the two fields have become strangers. Public health ethics, a new subfield of bioethics, emerged from the belly of contemporary biomedical ethics and has evolved over the past 25 years. It has moved from its traditional concern with the tension between individual autonomy and community health to a wider focus on social justice and solidarity. Public health has a broad focus that includes individual, community, and environmental health. Public health ethics attends to these broad commitments reflected in the increasing concern with the connectedness of health of individuals to the health of populations, to the health of animals, to the health of the environment; it is well situated to reconnect all three "fields" of ethics to promote a healthier planet.
Full text
Available for:
DOBA, IJS, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, OILJ, PILJ, PNG, PRFLJ, SAZU, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK, VSZLJ
Rats are an important issue in cities globally. Despite their ubiquity, perceptions and concerns about rats vary with circumstance and the context in which a person interacts with them. Municipal rat ...management programs are a service to communities and therefore must be responsive to the varied concerns of their residents. Understanding why communities are concerned about rats can help inform rat management programs to meet the specific needs of their residents. The objective of this study was to identify why the residents of Vancouver, Canada care about rats and what they want done to address them. To do this, we qualitatively analyzed 6,158 resident complaints about rats made to the city's municipal government between January 2014 and May 2020. Using a qualitative descriptive coding process, we found that rats were a priority in a minority of cases. In general, people were more concerned about broader community issues, such as neighborhood disorder, of which rats were one part. Complaints tended to be made when problems were highly visible, nearby, and when the complainant wanted the city to take action to alleviate this issue, particularly when they were in and around their living spaces. The rates of complaints were highest in the most economically and socially deprived neighborhoods and lowest in the most privileged neighbourhoods. We synthesize this information with a view towards understanding how to develop objectives and actions for municipal management strategies that are grounded in community concerns.
Full text
Available for:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Medical education continues to evolve with more schools adopting integrated, systems‐based curricula with reduced basic sciences contact hours in favor of more clinical content. While the reduced ...basic sciences time may jeopardize student competency, there are opportunities to impactfully integrate and teach basic sciences in an evidence‐based way to promote long‐term retention and higher‐ordered usage of the learned knowledge. This involves a multidisciplinary team approach to curricular design and collaborative teaching.
Foundational Principles course at the University of Colorado School of Medicine was intentionally designed as an integrated, spiral curriculum to expose the new students to the ten basic sciences contents at the introductory level, presented within the clinical framework. Each week of the course starts with a common chief concern (muscle weakness for example), and the classes during the week present various subjects such as anatomy, physiology, histopathology, and embryology of neuromusculature that students will need to learn to support patients. Therefore, all the classes during the week require subject experts to work as a team to organize and sequence the classes to support the most effective and impactful learning in students. At the end of each week, students complete a low‐stakes assessment to identify knowledge gaps. The highly integrated nature of each week therefore also requires subject experts to work as a team to construct valid and reliable integrated assessments.
The positive aspects of the educators’ teamwork in the integrated spiral curriculum include: 1) identification and consolidation of redundant content coverage or discrepancies; 2) team teaching opportunities leading to a dynamic and interactive learning experience for students to understand the connections among multiple disciplines; 3) opportunities to role‐model for students how professional colleagues from different fields handoff, communicate and collaborate; 4) intentional placement of fundamental concepts taught by different subject experts later in the course for spaced learning; 5) learning and professional development of faculty from interdisciplinary collaboration. Some of the major challenges with the curriculum that demands robust teamwork are scheduling meetings that work for all team members, buy‐in from all team members, and negotiating contact hours for various subjects. Several collaborative software and resources such as virtual meetings, and a platform for sharing documents and instant communications are critical in orchestrating such a curriculum.
Students’ performance in weekly assessments and the comprehensive end‐of‐course exam indicate excellent learning outcomes. Students’ evaluation of the course suggests that the team‐based approach to the integrated spiral curricular design and team teaching were well received, however, opportunities to enhance the course were also identified such as better curation and clear communication of the depth of multiple disciplines students need to learn each week. Deliberately signposting how each disciplines intersect, especially if the related subjects are not team‐taught, is another area to enhance to support student learning.
A multidisciplinary team approach to curricular design and teaching presents opportunities to effectively teach and reintegrate basic sciences into the medical curricula.
Full text
Available for:
BFBNIB, FZAB, GIS, IJS, KILJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, SAZU, SBCE, SBMB, UL, UM, UPUK
This paper presents evidence that household energy use in Uganda conforms to the energy ladder theory. As household income increases, solid and transitional fuel use evolves in an inverse U manner, ...while electricity consumption shows a direct relationship with income. Public infrastructure provision, income, and education are the key variables which can be targeted to reduce household dependence on solid-fuels while increasing non-solid fuel use. While education and public infrastructure have varying impacts on rural and urban households' energy mix, these variables generally reduce rudimentary fuel use and increase modern fuel consumption. Timely investment in electricity infrastructure is necessary to cater for burgeoning electricity demand as households become affluent. Strategies for reforestation, dissemination of improved cookstoves, relieving supply side constraints for modern fuels, and staggered payment options to lower the cost of entry for modern fuels can improve Ugandan households' energy security.
•Ugandan household energy use conforms to energy ladder theory.•All fuels except electricity exhibits an inverse U-shape trend with income.•Kerosene and charcoal have high turning points due to lack of modern substitutes.•Electricity use is increasing with income and shows no evidence of decline.•Infrastructure, education, and income are crucial to transitioning up the ladder.
Full text
Available for:
GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK
By Frank Kovalchek from Anchorage, Alaska, USA (Classic view of The Thinker) Cropped CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), via Wikimedia Commons.
Display omitted
•All technology ...requires us to consider both what we can do as well what we should do.•Ethics helps us consider what we should do with EHR data.•EHR ethics includes respect, non-maleficence, reciprocity, and professional duty.•Awareness of the ethical dimensions of how to use EHR data facilitates public trust.
The digital health landscape in the United States is evolving and electronic health record data hold great promise for improving health and health equity. Like many scientific and technological advances in health and medicine, there exists an exciting narrative about what we can do with the new technology, as well as reflection about what we should do with it based on what we value. Ethical reflections about the use of EHR data for research and quality improvement have considered the important issues of privacy and informed consent for subsequent use of data. Additional ethical aspects are important in the conversation, including data validity, patient obligation to participate in the learning health system, and ethics integration into training for all personnel who interact with personal health data. Attention to these ethical issues is paramount to our realizing the benefits of electronic health data.
Full text
Available for:
GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
Prostate cancer cells exhibit altered cellular metabolism but, notably, not the hallmarks of Warburg metabolism. Prostate cancer cells exhibit increased
synthesis of fatty acids (FA); however, little ...is known about how extracellular FAs, such as those in the circulation, may support prostate cancer progression. Here, we show that increasing FA availability increased intracellular triacylglycerol content in cultured patient-derived tumor explants, LNCaP and C4-2B spheroids, a range of prostate cancer cells (LNCaP, C4-2B, 22Rv1, PC-3), and prostate epithelial cells (PNT1). Extracellular FAs are the major source (∼83%) of carbons to the total lipid pool in all cell lines, compared with glucose (∼13%) and glutamine (∼4%), and FA oxidation rates are greater in prostate cancer cells compared with PNT1 cells, which preferentially partitioned extracellular FAs into triacylglycerols. Because of the higher rates of FA oxidation in C4-2B cells, cells remained viable when challenged by the addition of palmitate to culture media and inhibition of mitochondrial FA oxidation sensitized C4-2B cells to palmitate-induced apoptosis. Whereas in PC-3 cells, palmitate induced apoptosis, which was prevented by pretreatment of PC-3 cells with FAs, and this protective effect required DGAT-1-mediated triacylglycerol synthesis. These outcomes highlight for the first-time heterogeneity of lipid metabolism in prostate cancer cells and the potential influence that obesity-associated dyslipidemia or host circulating has on prostate cancer progression. IMPLICATIONS: Extracellular-derived FAs are primary building blocks for complex lipids and heterogeneity in FA metabolism exists in prostate cancer that can influence tumor cell behavior.
Integrity in research is essential so that research can do what it is supposed to do: help us discover - or get closer to - the truth about the world and how it works. Research integrity means ...conducting oneself in ways that are worthy of the trust that the public invests in science. Efforts over the past five decades to ensure that researchers conduct themselves with integrity have focused on regulating researcher behavior. The suite of regulatory requirements - over 100 of them - is typically managed by an office of research compliance at universities and research institutions. The regulations, and the accompanying rules and policies, have created a regulatory-industrial complex that, while necessary, should give us pause. With the proliferation of regulations, professional organizations and certifications blossom, providing much-needed training and vouching for expertise in particular regulations. This credibility is crucial, but it also gives a false impression that we can regulate our way to ethical science. Creating a regulatory-industrial complex will not achieve our goal of an ethical research enterprise. We need to build ethical institutional cultures, engage the commitment of the entire research enterprise, and do the hard work of holding accountable the entire research ecosystem.
Full text
Available for:
BFBNIB, GIS, IJS, IZUM, KILJ, KISLJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UL, UM, UPUK
Since the 3/11 disaster, Japan has doubled its fossil fuel imports to supplement the nuclear power outage. The consequences of this growing dependence on energy imports threaten economic stability ...and environmental sustainability. More than 28 million tons of rubble and debris have also been washed up on the coastline of the disaster-hit Northeast Japan, presenting significant logistical and environmental challenges. The Government of Japan announced the construction of biomass power plants to simultaneously increase the renewable energy mix and to dispose of the debris. This study evaluates the economic and environmental benefits (capital and lifetime operation costs, non-renewable energy consumption, greenhouse gases (GHG), particulate matter equivalent and sulphur dioxide equivalent emissions) of advanced waste-to-energy biomass technologies, comparing (i) traditional biomass direct combustion with combined heat and power system, (ii) gasification combined with diesel cycle engine, (iii) Fischer-Tropsch combined with diesel cycle engine, and (iv) biomass fermentation for ethanol fuel production. Results show that the gasification pathway is the most energy efficient and the least expensive modern alternative for energy production, but has worse environmental performance compared to higher-cost biorefineries. On the other hand, the co-production of liquid fuels and electricity results in lower local environmental impacts, but the unit cost of energy produced is more than double that of traditional technologies. Fischer-Tropsch is lower cost and cleaner than ethanol plants, making it the more desirable option of the biorefinery technologies.
•Waste-to-energy systems modelled to assess lifetime costs and environmental impacts.•Life cycle assessment includes biomass collection, transport, and processing.•Results are presented in capital and operation costs, and 5 impact categories.•Gasification is the most energy efficient and least costly alternative for power production.•Biorefineries have the lowest local impacts but its cost is higher than other alternatives.
Full text
Available for:
GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZRSKP
PDF
