The dead donor rule is fundamental to transplant ethics. The rule states that organ procurement must not commence until the donor is both dead and formally pronounced so, and by the same token, that ...procurement of organs must not cause the death of the donor. In a separate area of medical practice, there has been intense controversy around the participation of physicians in the execution of capital prisoners. These two apparently disparate topics converge in a unique case: the intimate involvement of transplant surgeons in China in the execution of prisoners via the procurement of organs. We use computational text analysis to conduct a forensic review of 2838 papers drawn from a dataset of 124 770 Chinese‐language transplant publications. Our algorithm searched for evidence of problematic declarations of brain death during organ procurement. We find evidence in 71 of these reports, spread nationwide, that brain death could not have properly been declared. In these cases, the removal of the heart during organ procurement must have been the proximate cause of the donor's death. Because these organ donors could only have been prisoners, our findings strongly suggest that physicians in the People's Republic of China have participated in executions by organ removal.
A computational text analysis of over 2,000 Chinese‐language medical publications finds that transplant surgeons in the People's Republic of China have participated in the execution of prisoners by procuring their organs before brain death was determined.
The scientific method is predicated on transparency—yet the pace at which transparent research practices are being adopted by the scientific community is slow. The replication crisis in psychology ...showed that published findings employing statistical inference are threatened by undetected errors, data manipulation and data falsification. To mitigate these problems and bolster research credibility, open data and preregistration practices have gained traction in the natural and social sciences. However, the extent of their adoption in different disciplines is unknown. We introduce computational procedures to identify the transparency of a research field using large-scale text analysis and machine learning classifiers. Using political science and international relations as an illustrative case, we examine 93 931 articles across the top 160 political science and international relations journals between 2010 and 2021. We find that approximately 21% of all statistical inference papers have open data and 5% of all experiments are preregistered. Despite this shortfall, the example of leading journals in the field shows that change is feasible and can be effected quickly.
Over 1 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines have been already administered across the United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union at the time of writing. Furthermore, 1.82 million booster ...doses have been administered in the US since 13th August, and similar booster programmes are currently planned or under consideration in the UK and the EU beginning in the autumn of 2021. Early reports showed an association between vaccine administration and the development of ipsilateral axillary and supraclavicular lymphadenopathy, which could interfere with the diagnosis, treatment and follow-up of breast cancer patients. In this paper, we review the available evidence on vaccine-related lymphadenopathy, and we discuss the clinical implications of the same on breast cancer diagnosis and management.
A literature search was performed – PubMed, Ovid Medline, Scopus, CINHAL, Springer Nature, ScienceDirect, Academic Search Premier and the Directory of Open Access Journals were searched for articles reporting on regional palpable or image-detected lymphadenopathy following COVID-19 vaccination.
Separately, we compiled a series of case studies from the University Hospitals of Derby and Burton, United Kingdom and the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, United States of America, to illustrate the impact that regional lymphadenopathy post-COVID-19 vaccination can have on the diagnosis and management of patients being seen in diagnostic and therapeutic breast clinics.
From the literature search, 15 studies met the inclusion criteria (n = 2057 patients, 737 with lymphadenopathy). The incidence of lymphadenopathy ranged between 14.5% and 53% and persisted for >6 weeks in 29% of patients.
Clinicians managing breast cancer patients should be aware that the COVID-19 vaccination may result in regional lymphadenopathy in a significant number of patients, which can result in unnecessary investigations, treatment and increased patient anxiety. An accurate COVID-19 vaccination history should be collected from all patients where regional lymphadenopathy is a clinical and/or an imaging finding and then combined with clinical judgement when managing individual cases.
•Most cases of adenopathy after the COVID-19 vaccine were detected during the PET-CT scan.•True incidence of COVID-19 vaccine adenopathy is 2–3 times higher than in the trials.•Old, immunosuppressed patients with single vaccine doses have low rates of adenopathy.•Young, immunocompetent, fully vaccinated patients have high rates of adenopathy.•Lymphadenopathy can persist >10 weeks following the last vaccine in 29% of patients.
Since 2010 the People's Republic of China has been engaged in an effort to reform its system of organ transplantation by developing a voluntary organ donation and allocation infrastructure. This has ...required a shift in the procurement of organs sourced from China's prison and security apparatus to hospital-based voluntary donors declared dead by neurological and/or circulatory criteria. Chinese officials announced that from January 1, 2015, hospital-based donors would be the sole source of organs. This paper examines the availability, transparency, integrity, and consistency of China's official transplant data.
Forensic statistical methods were used to examine key deceased organ donation datasets from 2010 to 2018. Two central-level datasets - published by the China Organ Transplant Response System (COTRS) and the Red Cross Society of China - are tested for evidence of manipulation, including conformance to simple mathematical formulae, arbitrary internal ratios, the presence of anomalous data artefacts, and cross-consistency. Provincial-level data in five regions are tested for coherence, consistency, and plausibility, and individual hospital data in those provinces are examined for consistency with provincial-level data.
COTRS data conforms almost precisely to a mathematical formula (which first appeared to be a general quadratic, but with further confirmatory data was discovered to be a simpler one-parameter quadratic) while Central Red Cross data mirrors it, albeit imperfectly. The analysis of both datasets suggests human-directed data manufacture and manipulation. Contradictory, implausible, or anomalous data artefacts were found in five provincial datasets, suggesting that these data may have been manipulated to enforce conformity with central quotas. A number of the distinctive features of China's current organ procurement and allocation system are discussed, including apparent misclassification of nonvoluntary donors as voluntary.
A variety of evidence points to what the authors believe can only be plausibly explained by systematic falsification and manipulation of official organ transplant datasets in China. Some apparently nonvoluntary donors also appear to be misclassified as voluntary. This takes place alongside genuine voluntary organ transplant activity, which is often incentivized by large cash payments. These findings are relevant for international interactions with China's organ transplantation system.
Recent work has shown that, during sleep, a functional circuit is created amidst a general breakdown in connectivity following fast-frequency bursts of brain activity. The findings question the ...unconscious nature of deep sleep, and provide an explanation for its contribution to memory processing.
Recent work has shown that, during sleep, a functional circuit is created amidst a general breakdown in connectivity following fast-frequency bursts of brain activity. The findings question the unconscious nature of deep sleep, and provide an explanation for its contribution to memory processing.
ObjectivesThe objective of this study is to investigate whether papers reporting research on Chinese transplant recipients comply with international professional standards aimed at excluding ...publication of research that: (1) involves any biological material from executed prisoners; (2) lacks Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval and (3) lacks consent of donors.DesignScoping review based on Arksey and O’Mallee’s methodological framework.Data sourcesMedline, Scopus and Embase were searched from January 2000 to April 2017.Eligibility criteriaWe included research papers published in peer-reviewed English-language journals reporting on outcomes of research involving recipients of transplanted hearts, livers or lungs in mainland China.Data extraction and synthesisData were extracted by individual authors working independently following training and benchmarking. Descriptive statistics were compiled using Excel.Results445 included studies reported on outcomes of 85 477 transplants. 412 (92.5%) failed to report whether or not organs were sourced from executed prisoners; and 439 (99%) failed to report that organ sources gave consent for transplantation. In contrast, 324 (73%) reported approval from an IRB. Of the papers claiming that no prisoners’ organs were involved in the transplants, 19 of them involved 2688 transplants that took place prior to 2010, when there was no volunteer donor programme in China.DiscussionThe transplant research community has failed to implement ethical standards banning publication of research using material from executed prisoners. As a result, a large body of unethical research now exists, raising issues of complicity and moral hazard to the extent that the transplant community uses and benefits from the results of this research. We call for retraction of this literature pending investigation of individual papers.
Seabirds that form large colonies often act as biovectors that transport and concentrate large amounts of nutrients, metals, and contaminants from marine feeding areas to inland breeding grounds. ...This enrichment can potentially transform and structure primary productivity, vegetation communities, and species richness. In a previous paleolimnological study, we examined approximately 1700 years of population change in the world’s largest colony of Leach’s Storm-petrel (Hydrobates leucorhous) on Baccalieu Island (New-foundland and Labrador, Canada) and, using a variety of proxies, we identified two peaks in colony around 500 and 1980 CE. Here, we analyzed the same sediment cores for fossil pollen assemblages to explore the effects of changing seabird populations on terrestrial vegetation. Aerial imagery revealed the island’s vegetation cover that increased from about 23% to about 58% between 1940 and 2017, in part coinciding with the rapid colony growth until around 1980. Palynological analyses indicated shifts from tree and shrub habitat to storm-petrels’preferred habitat of fern, grass, and moss during peak seabird abundances around 500 and 1980 CE. Also, during peaks in colony size, nitrogen-fixing alder (Alnus spp.) decreased in relative abundance likely due to poorer competitive potential because of guano-derived nitrogen fertilization. Furthermore, we observed increases in fungal hyphae concurrent with the inferred size of the storm-petrel colony, providing the potential for a novel proxy to track burrowing seabirds in sediment records. Collectively, our data show that storm-petrels acted as ecosystem engineers by markedly modifying the island’s vegetation cover and composition. If global seabird colonies continue to decline at current rates, there may be considerable bottom-up ramifications to terrestrial island ecosystems.
Recent estimates indicate that ∼70% of the world’s seabird populations have declined since the 1950s due to human activities. However, for almost all bird populations, there is insufficient long-term ...monitoring to understand baseline (i.e., preindustrial) conditions, which are required to distinguish natural versus anthropogenically driven changes. Here, we address this lack of long-term monitoring data with multiproxy paleolimnological approaches to examine the long-term population dynamics of a major colony of Leach’s Storm-petrel (Hydrobates leucorhous) on Grand Colombier Island in the St. Pierre and Miquelon archipelago—an overseas French territory in the northwest Atlantic Ocean. By reconstructing the last ∼5,800 y of storm-petrel dynamics, we demonstrate that this colony underwent substantial natural fluctuations until the start of the 19th century, when population cycles were disrupted, coinciding with the establishment and expansion of a European settlement. Our paleoenvironmental data, coupled with on-the-ground population surveys, indicate that the current colony is only ∼16% of the potential carrying capacity, reinforcing concerning trends of globally declining seabird populations. As seabirds are sentinel species of marine ecosystem health, such declines provide a call to action for global conservation. In response, we emphasize the need for enlarged protected areas and the rehabilitation of disturbed islands to protect ecologically critical seabird populations. Furthermore, long-term data, such as those provided by paleoecological approaches, are required to better understand shifting baselines in conservation to truly recognize current rates of ecological loss.
Seabird population size is intimately linked to the physical, chemical, and biological processes of the oceans. Yet, the overall effects of long‐term changes in ocean dynamics on seabird colonies are ...difficult to quantify. Here, we used dated lake sediments to reconstruct ~10,000‐years of seabird dynamics in the Northwest Atlantic to determine the influences of Holocene‐scale climatic oscillations on colony size. On Baccalieu Island (Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada)—where the world's largest colony of Leach's storm‐petrel (Hydrobates leucorhous Vieillot 1818) currently breeds—our data track seabird colony growth in response to warming during the Holocene Thermal Maximum (ca. 9000 to 6000 BP). From ca. 5200 BP to the onset of the Little Ice Age (ca. 550 BP), changes in colony size were correlated to variations in the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO). By contrasting the seabird trends from Baccalieu Island to millennial‐scale changes of storm‐petrel populations from Grand Colombier Island (an island in the Northwest Atlantic that is subjected a to different ocean climate), we infer that changes in NAO influenced the ocean circulation, which translated into, among many things, changes in pycnocline depth across the Northwest Atlantic basin where the storm‐petrels feed. We hypothesize that the depth of the pycnocline is likely a strong bottom‐up control on surface‐feeding storm‐petrels through its influence on prey accessibility. Since the Little Ice Age (LIA), the effects of ocean dynamics on seabird colony size have been altered by anthropogenic impacts. Subsequently, the colony on Baccalieu Island grew at an unprecedented rate to become the world's largest resulting from favorable conditions linked to climate warming, increased vegetation (thereby nesting habitat), and attraction of recruits from other colonies that are now in decline. We show that although ocean dynamics were an important driver of seabird colony dynamics, its recent influence has been modified by human interference.
Trends in seabird colony size from an island in the Northwest Atlantic Ocean over the past ~10,000 years. The colony size generally increased in correspondence to prolonged periods of warmer oceanic conditions, such as the Holocene Thermal Maximum and negative North Atlantic Oscillations. We link these periods to favorable conditions for population growth, such as increased habitat availability and prey accessibility. However, the link between oceanic conditions and seabird colony size has been disrupted over the last few decades, and the colony is now in decline.
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