Faculty Bibliography

The two American missionaries who contracted the almost-always-fatal virus in West Africa were given access to an experimental drug cocktail called ZMapp. It consists of immune-boosting monoclonal antibodies that were extracted from mice exposed to bits of Ebola DNA. Now in isolation at an Atlanta hospital, they appear to be doing well.

Lung transplantation is a potentially life-saving procedure for patients with irreversible lung failure. Five-year survival rates after lung transplantation are >50% for children and young adults. But there are not enough lungs to save everyone who could benefit. In 2005, the United Network for Organ Sharing developed a scoring system to prioritize patients for transplantation. That system considered transplant urgency as well as time on the waiting list and the likelihood that the patient would benefit from the transplant. At the time, there were so few pediatric lung transplants that the data that were used to develop the Lung Allocation Score were inadequate to analyze and prioritize children, so they were left out of the Lung Allocation Score system. In 2013, the family of a 10-year-old challenged this system, claiming that it was unjust to children. In the article, we asked experts in health policy, bioethics, and transplantation to discuss the issues in the Murnaghan case.

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

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

[...]because of the 'terrible choice' Medicare rules impose, hospice is not doing end-of-life care as much as brink-of-death care."