Ethics news and information

Scientists have finally recovered stem cells from cloned human embryos, a long-standing goal that could lead to new treatments for such illnesses as Parkinson's disease and diabetes.
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Florida lawmakers ended their 60-day session Friday, waiting until the final hour to pass a $74.5 billion budget and then leaving town without passing a bill to extend healthcare coverage to 1.1 million Floridians.
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A study of conflicts of interest in leading cancer journals showed financial connections between authors and companies sponsoring phase 3 clinical trials had little impact on interpretation of the results.
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Physicians should exercise caution—and “pause before posting”—when interacting in online settings in order to preserve professionalism and maintain appropriate patient-physician relationships, according to a policy paper released today by the American College of Physicians...
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A federal agency found a number of universities failed to properly inform over a thousand families in a study involving extremely premature babies about potential risks, including blindness and death.
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A group of Vermont doctors and mostly Republican lawmakers gathered Wednesday to warn that if Vermont goes ahead with its plan to push toward a Canadian-style, single-payer healthcare system, the state will ''regulate the private practice of medicine in Vermont out of existence.''
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Before the release of the omnibus privacy rule earlier his year, or passage of the more stringent privacy provisions of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, or even the main federal health information privacy law, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, there...
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The University of California, Irvine agreed to pay $1.2 million to settle fraud allegations that it allowed residents at its medical center to give patients anesthesia without supervision, then billed Medicare as if doctors were present.
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Federal authorities and healthcare providers continue to wrestle with conflicts that might taint decisions about which drugs reach patients. Concerns persist even as new federal rules that seek to improve transparency among providers and drug and device manufacturers go into effect.
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Dr. C. Everett Koop, who raised the profile of the surgeon general by riveting America's attention on the then-emerging disease known as AIDS and by railing against smoking, has died at age 96.
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