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Antimicrobial Resistance: Is Health Technology Assessment Part of the Solution or Part of the Problem?
Get PDFAntimicrobial resistance is a serious challenge to the success and sustainability of our healthcare systems. There has been increasing policy attention given to antimicrobial resistance in the last few years, and increased amounts of funding have been channeled into funding for research and development of antimicrobial agents. Nevertheless, manufacturers doubt whether there will be a market for new antimicrobial technologies sufficient to enable them to recoup their investment. Health technology assessment (HTA) has a critical role in creating confidence that if valuable technologies can be developed they will be reimbursed at a level that captures their true value. We identify 3 deficiencies of current HTA processes for appraising antimicrobial agents: a methods-centric approach rather than problem-centric approach for dealing with new challenges, a lack of tools for thinking about changing patterns of infection, and the absence of an approach to epidemiological risks. We argue that, to play their role more effectively, HTA agencies need to broaden their methodological tool kit, design and communicate their analysis to a wider set of users, and incorporate long-term policy goals, such as containing resistance, as part of their evaluation criteria alongside immediate health gains
Antibiotic Resistance in the Patient With Cancer: Escalating Challenges and Paths Forward
Get PDFInfection is the second leading cause of death in patients with cancer. Loss of efficacy in antibiotics due to antibiotic resistance in bacteria is an urgent threat against the continuing success of cancer therapy. In this review, the authors focus on recent updates on the impact of antibiotic resistance in the cancer setting, particularly on the ESKAPE pathogens (Enterococcus faecium, Staphylococcus aureus, Klebsiella pneumoniae, Acinetobacter baumannii, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and Enterobacter spp.). This review highlights the health and financial impact of antibiotic resistance in patients with cancer. Furthermore, the authors recommend measures to control the emergence of antibiotic resistance, highlighting the risk factors associated with cancer care. A lack of data in the etiology of infections, specifically in oncology patients in United States, is identified as a concern, and the authors advocate for a centralized and specialized surveillance system for patients with cancer to predict and prevent the emergence of antibiotic resistance. Finding better ways to predict, prevent, and treat antibiotic-resistant infections will have a major positive impact on the care of those with cancer
Racism as a Human Rights Risk: Reconsidering the Corporate \u27Responsibility to Respect\u27 Rights
Get PDFDarnella Frazer, a teenage witness to a fatal police encounter, used social media to share her cell phone video footage capturing a white police officer casually kneeling on the neck of a handcuffed Black man named George Floyd for nearly nine minutes. Her video rapidly went viral, sparking civil unrest across the United States (US) and protests around the world.1 Independent experts of the Special Procedures of the United Nations Human Rights Council came together to issue a joint statement condemning \u27systemic racism\u27 and \u27state sponsored racial violence\u27 in the US.2 George Floyd was not the first unarmed Black person to die in police custody under questionable circumstances,3 but his murder motivated many to confront the reality of racism in American society. A broad section of the business community reacted to the civil unrest in the immediate aftermath of the murder of George Floyd with solidarity statements denouncing racism and pledges to promote racial equality.4 Brands rushed to embrace the previously untouchable #BlackLivesMatter movement in marketing campaigns. Business leaders expressed interested in evaluating how particular policies and practices operate in ways that serve to promote racial discrimination or perpetuate racial inequality.5
Now, a year later, protests have subsided and the officer who killed George Floyd has been tried, convicted, and sentenced for the crime. As the United Nations Working Group on Business and Human Rights launches the UNGPs+10 initiative to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) this year to chart a course of action for implementing them more broadly, it is especially timely to reconsider what the business responsibility to respect human rights entails in the context of racialized capitalism and to reflect on how businesses could respond more effectively to calls for racial justice. There are lessons to be learned from the way businesses have engaged with #BlackLivesMatter activists and the broader racial justice movement
Incorporating Rights: Strategies to Advance Corporate Accountability
No full textHuman rights have not been a central concern of corporate law. Corporate actors have not been a central concern of international human rights law. This book examines existing and emerging strategies that could conceivably close a global governance gap that places human rights at risk and puts commercial actors in the position of becoming complicit in human rights abuses or implicated in abuses when conducting business in emerging market economies or other complex environments. Corporate codes of conduct, sustainability reporting, and selected multi-stakeholder initiatives are presented as the building blocks of a system of strengthening soft law that could solidify to become binding baseline standards for better business practices. It explains the conditions that have given rise to constructive change as well as those methods and mechanisms with promise for ensuring that business enterprises incorporate human rights considerations into business operations.This book explores how capital and consumer markets could provide an additional or alternative form of enforcement to promote responsible business conduct. It provides comparative accounts of the creation of industry sector specific regulatory instruments and governance institutions arising from allegations of corporate complicity in human rights abuses after conflicts with concerned constituencies and affected communities. It considers market-based strategies to bring business practices into alignment with the responsibility to respect human rights and examines how corporate social responsibility initiatives could close the governance gap and how codes of conduct could come to regulate like real rules. It argues that regulation through information is essential to ensure that corporate conduct will be informed by human rights considerations and that business policies and practices will be implemented consistent with respect for human rights.https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/books/1370/thumbnail.jp
Palmore v. Sidoti: The Troubling Effects of \u27Private Biases\u27
Get PDFA cloud of disembodied and disapproving eyes hovers behind three figures forming a family tableau at the center of Xavier Cortada’s painting about Palmore v. Sidoti (1984). Linda Sidoti Palmore, a white mother, holds onto her young daughter, Melanie, who in turn holds the hand of Charles Palmore, a black man, Linda’s new husband. As Cortada writes of the painting, part of a series about landmark Supreme Court cases that originated in his home state of Florida, those eyes “in a sea of Caucasian skin” —and the “profound racism” they reflected—tried to tip the balance in a custody battle. Melanie’s white father, Anthony Sidoti, disapproved of her mother’s interracial relationship and persuaded a trial court to transfer custody to him because of the “social stigmatization” Melanie would surely suffer, despite “strides” in race relations. The Supreme Court reversed, famously declaring that “private biases may be outside the reach of the law, but the law cannot, directly or indirectly, give them effect.” Cortada celebrates this seeming legal triumph by showing the interracial family striding forward despite the disapproving eyes. Despite Linda’s legal victory, however, she never regained custody of her child. And, as this chapter depicts, her marriage to Charles was troubled and brief. The judgmental eyes that Cortada depicts achieved the initial disruption of Linda’s family tableau he depicts. The blind eye the Supreme Court turned to her requests for the return of her daughter while she pursued her constitutional claim continued that disruption, and state court judges then aided her ex-husband’s legal maneuverings to keep Melanie. Drawing on news stories and legal filings in the case, this chapter chronicles the disturbing “effect” of prejudice and explains that the more typical family tableau was one of absence – with Melanie present only as a photograph at which Linda gazes
A Radical, Subaltern Chorus: Saidiya Hartman’s Album of Rebellious Young Black Women
Get PDFSaidiya Hartman opens her powerful and lyrical Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval with an epigraph from Harlem Renaissance author Nella Larsen’s Quicksand: “She was, she knew, in a queer indefinite way, a disturbing factor.” As I read Hartman’s brilliant narrative recreation of the voices, words, and intimate lives of “young black women,” at the turn of the twentieth century, as they sought “to create autonomous and beautiful lives, to escape the new forms of servitude awaiting them, and to live as if they were free” (P. xiii), another Harlem Renaissance novel came to mind: Jessie Redmon Fauset’s Plum Bun: A Novel Without a Moral (1929). The desire to live free also preoccupies Angela Murray, the young Black woman whose own intimate history and experiments in living are at the center of Plum Bun. While Murray has more economic and family resources and class privilege than the young Black women whose lives Hartman makes palpably and poignantly real to readers, this fictional heroine and these women alike perceive the bar that “the color line” poses—at every turn— to living “as if” free. “Freedom!” is the most frequent “note” in the “melody of living” of which Angela dreams, and she perceives that “[c]olour or rather the lack of it seemed . . . the one absolute prerequisite” to that dream life and to the “difference between freedom and fetters.” (Fauset 13, 137.
Bigotry, Civility, and Reinvigorating Civic Education: Government\u27s Formative Task Amidst Polarization
Get PDFIn the U.S. and around the globe, concerns over a decline in civility and tolerance and a surge in lethal extremist violence motivated by hatred of religious and racial groups make condemning—and preventing—hatred and bigotry seem urgent. What meaning can the ideal of e pluribus unum (“out of many one”) have in this fraught and polarized environment? Within the U.S., a long line of jurists, politicians, and educators have invoked civic education in public schools as vital to preserving constitutional democracy and a healthy pluralism. How can schools carry out such a civic role in times of democratic discord and increasing polarization and political partisanship (even political “bigotry”)? This chapter argues for civic education as a tool that government should employ to foster civility and decrease contempt and prejudice. If, as educators insist, civic education must be different in the 21st century to be effective, then what form should that reboot take? This book examines the “why,” “what,” and “how” of a reinvigorated civic education – its aims and content, as well as the best (or “proven”) practices for engaging in it given class- and race-based civic inequalities. I also argue that religious literacy (nonsectarian education about religion) should be a component of civic education because of the harmful effects of widespread religious illiteracy. Teaching students to think critically and to deliberate respectfully across difference is no easy task; LGBTQ rights is one example of the challenges educators face in engaging students in encountering and understanding different perspectives on controversial issues, while also creating the conditions so that students may do so in a safe and respectful environment
The Trauma of Awakening to Racism: Did the Tragic Killing of George Floyd Result in Cultural Trauma for Whites?
Get PDFThe act of witnessing the killing of George Floyd, a forty-six-year-old, African-American father, brother, partner, and son, at the hands of the police caused many white individuals to experience an epiphany about racism, specifically structural racism, in the United States. Following the horrific killing of George Floyd, many white people began to shift their thinking about the existence and prevalence of racialized police brutality, reconsidering the manner in which they had always viewed the world around them. Indeed, many white individuals began to recognize and acknowledge the varied ways in which whiteness worked to privilege them in our society, even if they found themselves disadvantaged on other dimensions. Many also began to acknowledge their responsibility as white citizens of the world to not only identify but also confront racism, which led to an unprecedented number of white people participating in protests across the nation. Although the protests that erupted in the wake of George Floyd’s killing were not the first protests against police brutality and racism, they were different from those of the past. During the protests of summer 2020, white faces filled the crowds that gathered all across the country, even in predominantly white communities.
This Article considers whether white people as a collective experienced a cultural trauma in response to witnessing the killing of George Floyd on video, thereby creating unprecedented opportunities for real, long-term change with respect to policing in the United States. To explore whether white individuals’ widespread viewing of George Floyd’s killing resulted in cultural or group-based trauma, this Article examines accounts by Whites who have offered emotional, social, intellectual, and political responses to witnessing a smirking then-Officer Derek Chauvin kneel on George Floyd’s neck for nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds.
This Article considers whether the response that many white individuals shared in reaction to the George Floyd killing satisfies the components of a cultural trauma narrative. In doing so, the Article applies critical race theory and analyzes decades of polling data to determine whether the white awakening resulting from George Floyd’s killing is the type of permanent group-based trauma that could maintain the momentum needed to produce lasting social, political, and legal reform in the United States. The Article concludes that, due to missing components of the “master narrative” for cultural trauma, no such trauma arose. The Article ends with data showing that the shift in some white people’s thinking about the connection between racism and policing seems to be temporary
Intellectual Property and Ethnography: A Qualitative Research Approach
Get PDFThis chapter describes the processes of and justifications for qualitative empirical research in intellectual property (IP) as compared to other research methods, such as quantitative empirical approaches and theoretical economic analyses of law. It provides examples of these research methods, explains the reasons for pursuing a qualitative approach, and details a qualitative research agenda in the context of intellectual property law, as well as a step-by-step method of data collection and data analysis
The Journey to Separate but Equal: Madame DeCuir\u27s Quest for Racial Justice in the Reconstruction Era
No full textIn The Journey to Separate but Equal: Madame Decuir’s Quest for Racial Justice in the Reconstruction Era, Jack Beermann tells the story of how, in Hall v. Decuir, the post–Civil War US Supreme Court took its first step toward perpetuating the subjugation of the non-White population of the United States by actively preventing a Southern state from prohibiting segregation on a riverboat in the coasting trade on the Mississippi River. The Journey to Separate but Equal offers the first complete exploration of Hall v. Decuir, with an in-depth look at the case’s record; the lives of the parties, lawyers, and judges; and the case’s social context in 1870s Louisiana. The book centers around the remarkable story of Madame Josephine Decuir and the lawsuit she pursued because she had been illegally barred from the cabin reserved for White women on the Governor Allen riverboat.
The drama of Madame Decuir’s fight against segregation’s denial of her dignity as a human and particularly as a woman enriches our understanding of the Reconstruction era, especially in Louisiana, including political and legal changes that occurred during that time and the plight of people of color who were freed from slavery but denied their dignity and rights as American citizens. Hall v. Decuir spanned the pivotal period of 1872–1878, during which White segregationist Democrats “redeemed” the South from Republican control. The Supreme Court’s ruling in Hall overturned the application of an 1869 Louisiana statute prohibiting racial segregation in Madame Decuirs case because of the status of the Mississippi River as a mode of interstate commerce. The decision represents a crucial precedent that established the legal groundwork for the entrenchment of Jim Crow in the law of the United States, leading directly to the Courts adoption of separate but equal in Plessy v. Ferguson.https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/books/1140/thumbnail.jp