Faculty Bibliography

Chikungunya is a new and exceptionally nasty threat that has recently appeared in the US, having traveled via mosquitoes from Africa to Asia to Europe to the Caribbean. No specific treatment, vaccine, or preventative drug exists for this virus. If it doesn't kill people, the severe pain it causes takes a week or more to go away. Here, Caplan tackles scientists' solution for parasites

In 2012, fast-food companies spent $4.6 billion on ads, while $116 million was spent advertising fruits and vegetables. Because young people see tons of food ads on adult-targeted programs, it makes sense to cite the whole $4.6 billion figure

Various strategies have been pushed to solve the problem, such as creating medical schools that emphasize educating primary-care providers, increasing the number of residencies for medical school graduates, and expanding the number and authority of non-physician providers of primary care to include nurse practitioners, physician assistants, psychologists and pharmacists. The real question is, can someone who successfully got through four years of medical school, including a lot of clinical time, who is supervised and certified by another doctor for a month and by the state board but who is probably not near the top of their class, deliver high-quality primary care to people who currently have nothing? I think we don't know

Vaccines are among the most cost-effective interventions against infectious diseases. Many candidate vaccines targeting neglected diseases in low- and middle-income countries are now progressing to large-scale clinical testing. However, controversy surrounds the appropriate design of vaccine trials and, in particular, the use of unvaccinated controls (with or without placebo) when an efficacious vaccine already exists. This paper specifies four situations in which placebo use may be acceptable, provided that the study question cannot be answered in an active-controlled trial design; the risks of delaying or foregoing an efficacious vaccine are mitigated; the risks of using a placebo control are justified by the social and public health value of the research; and the research is responsive to local health needs. The four situations are: (1) developing a locally affordable vaccine, (2) evaluating the local safety and efficacy of an existing vaccine, (3) testing a new vaccine when an existing vaccine is considered inappropriate for local use (e.g. based on epidemiologic or demographic factors), and (4) determining the local burden of disease.

Arthur L. Caplan is a bioethicist and director of the division of medical ethics at New York University's Langone Medical Center

The two American missionaries who contracted the almost-always-fatal Ebola virus in West Africa were given access to an experimental drug cocktail called ZMapp. The medical missionaries got the experimental drug because the evangelical Christian International Relief organization for which they work, Samaritan's Purse, reached out to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health

Various strategies have been pushed to solve the problem, such as creating medical schools that emphasize educating primary-care providers, increasing the number of residencies for medical school graduates, and expanding the number and authority of non-physician providers of primary care to include nurse practitioners, physician assistants, psychologists and pharmacists. The real question is, can someone who successfully got through four years of medical school, including a lot of clinical time, who is supervised and certified by another doctor for a month and by the state board but who is probably not near the top of their class, deliver high-quality primary care to people who currently have nothing? I think we don't know

The missionaries got the experimental drug because the evangelical Christian International Relief organization they work for reached out to the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health to find out if there was a drug to give to them