The third issue of the ASSET Paper Series focuses on some highly delicate topics that lie at the intersection of science, ethics, politics, and economics. In the first article of the collection, Donato Greco, epidemiologist and public health expert, discusses about the role and the management of national borders when dealing with both the spread of an infectious disease and the flow of migrants or refugees, citing the recent EU decision on such a matter.
Last January, the scientific journal Nature published a news about scientists who do research funded by the Gates Foundation, who are not allowed to publish their work in those journals that do not comply with the Foundation’s open-access policy. This is the case of important publications such as Nature, Science and the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM).
Immunization rates in Italy are decreasing at a worrying trend: international targets for measles eradication and safety thresholds in childhood vaccination are vanishing. Authorities, doctors and families are concerned that a coverage below 86% for MPR (measles, parotitis and rubella) vaccine can impair herd immunity, putting younger babies, immunocompromised people and not-responders at risk.
Internationally, the issue of including women in clinical trials of medicines has been addressed in various guidelines issued by the International Conference on Harmonization (ICH), which promotes regulatory standards for clinical trials. While ICH has specific guidelines on the conduct of clinical trials in paediatric and geriatric populations, there are no consolidated guidelines for the investigation of medicinal product in women.
Month by month, the diseases spread across the world, cities fall into panic and some of them are even wiped out by virulent outbreaks, while tenacious experts cooperate to find a cure before it’s too late.
Since the thalidomide tragedy in the late1950s, there has been a reluctance to include women of childbearing age in clinical trials. However, this fear cannot be used as an excuse to not include females in clinical trials, and, with proper care and regulation, increased female participation has been reached. The United States adopted regulation early on to increase the participation of women, while a new regulation in Europe is going to improve this as well. Here follows an overview of the issue in Canada and in the USA. The third part of this series will deal with new regulation in Europe.
The internet deals a lot with flu, but mostly talks about care and little about prevention. This is the result of a study made by Voices from the Blogs, a spin-off of the University of Milan, on the web-sentiment on influenza and vaccination in Italy.
On July 30th, the Verbier Festival, one of the most prestigious music festival in Europe, hosted “Concerto for Piano and science”, a public workshop organized in collaboration with the ASSET project.
