Religiously-Motivated Medical Neglect: A Response to Professors Levin, Jacobs, and Arora

This Response to Professors Levin, Jacobs, and Arora’s article To Accommodate or Not to Accommodate: (When) Should the State Regulate Religion to Protect the Rights of Children and Third Parties? focuses on their claim that the law governing religious exemptions to medical neglect is messy, unprincipled, and in need of reform, including because it violates the Establishment Clause. I disagree with this assessment and provide support for my position. Specifically, I summarize and assess the current state of this law and its foundation in the perennial tussle between parental rights and state authority to make decisions for and about the child. Because these are featured as examples in their work, I also summarize and assess the current state of the law on vaccinations and male circumcision. I conclude with some thoughts on Levin, Jacobs, and Arora’s provocative suggestion that the law governing religious exemptions to medical neglect (as reformed according to their terms) might provide a template for addressing other accommodation claims such as those of religiously-motivated opponents of gay marriage

Awareness regarding female breast cancer in Kashmiri males - A study

Breast cancer is a major killer disease in females globally and in developing regions, where the early cancer detection facilities are unavailable, prognosis is even worse. Awareness about this disease can lead to early detection and thereby decrease the morbidity and mortality. A self designed questionnaire was used to study the level of awareness regarding breast cancer among males. The questionnaire had 15 questions and on the basis on score attained, the subjects were classified as having poor, average or good breast cancer awareness. Out of 624 participants, 555(89%) had poor breast cancer awareness and 47(7.5%) had average awareness. Only 22 (3.5%) had good awareness about breast cancer. The level of awareness regarding female breast cancer in Kashmiri males is very low. Measures need to be taken to spread awareness about this disease in males so that they can play a vital role in early detection of this disease

Clear Consensus, Ambiguous Commitment

Americans from every demographic, socioeconomic, racial, and ethnic category identify themselves as concerned about the environment, and most say that they have personally taken steps to reduce pollution or improve environmental quality in some way. One of the most salient cultural and social signatures of the contemporary era in the United States, and throughout much of the world, has been the diffusion of a desire to protect, preserve, and restore features of the natural environment to a greater degree than current practices and policies do. These environmental concerns are not only widely shared, they have been extended to become a wide policy agenda. No longer confined to preserving national parks or eliminating the most noxious forms of smog and the most obvious kinds of water pollution, the environmental agenda has expanded to embrace the preservation of open spaces, critical habitats, wetlands, tropical rain forests, and other natural areas; the reduction of all forms of harmful pollution and emissions; and the reformation of personal habits of consumption and corporate practices of production that underlie the supply and demand of products that directly or indirectly harm the environment. Environmental implications are everywhere and they have seeped into everyone\u27s consciousness

The Failure of Federal Biotechnology Regulation

The recent court case and state ballot measures regarding mandatory labels for Genetically Modified Organisms (“GMOs”) suggest the need for a deeper conversation about the federal framework for regulating biotechnology. What is it about GMOs that consumers feel they have the “right to know?” Why has a generation of federal biotechnology regulation failed to satisfy consumer concerns? Are those concerns irrational, or is the regulatory structure inadequate? This Article argues that many consumer concerns underlying the labeling movement raise important scientific and extra- scientific questions that have been apparent since the advent of the technology in the 1980s. Moreover, these concerns persist because the Coordinated Framework for Regulation of Biotechnology has failed to respond to them effectively. The Coordinated Framework was based on statutes that pre-existed the technology and thus poorly fit the unique risks of genetic engineering. Today, genetic engineering is on the verge of a radical shift in technology, a shift that has already begun to burst the seams of those old statutes, leaving agencies with no regulatory authority at all over new products. This Article reviews the evidence behind persistent concerns about GMOs, considers the failures of the Coordinated Framework to address the most valid of those concerns, and canvasses policy questions that Congress must consider to more effectively tailor agency authority to address the risks and to enhance the potential of this rapidly-changing field of technology

Historical Development of the Linear Nonthreshold Dose-Response Model as Applied to Radiation

[Excerpt] Despite the nearly universal adoption of the linear nonthreshold dose response model (LNT) as the primary basis for radiation protection standards for the past half century, the LNT remains highly controversial and a contentious topic of discussion among health physicists, radiation biologists, and other radiological scientists. Indeed, it has been pointed out that the LNT has assumed the status of a paradigm, synonymous with an ideal, standard, or paragon or perhaps to some, a sacred cow. Reduced to its very basics, the LNT postulates that every increment of ionizing radiation dose, however small, carries with it a commensurate increase in the chance or risk that the exposed individual will suffer some undesirable radiation effect, and that the risk thus incurred is directly proportional or linearly related to the dose. The specific effects are termed “stochastic,” which has been defined as “of a random or statistical nature.” Stochastic or probabilistic effects of radiation may occur as a result of low doses and are generally taken to be cancers (including leukemias) and genetic defects in the progeny. The severity of these radiation-induced stochastic effects, should they occur, are independent of the dose that produced them; thus, even though the likelihood or probability of an occurrence may be small to negligible, any and all manifestations of a radiation induced stochastic effect will have equal severity. By contrast, higher doses of radiation are known to produce characteristic somatic or deterministic effects including erythema, epilation, sterility, diminution of blood cell counts, cataracts and, in very high exposures, acute and chronic radiation syndromes. Such frank biological effects are nonstochastic in nature (in fact, they were at one time termed “nonstochastic effects”) and will always be manifested once a particular minimum dose – i.e., a “threshold” – has been received. The severity of the effect is related to the dose. Below the threshold dose there will be no demonstrable effect; as the dose increases beyond the threshold, so does the severity of the effect, or the degree of harm. … The purpose of the above discussion is to illustrate the underlying controversy and confusion that surrounds the LNT today, as well to underscore the lack of precision that sometimes accompanies the arguments of both the proponents and opponents of the LNT. Given that the LNT is a low dose phenomenon, there needs to at least be consensus on what is low dose, and such a consensus needs also to include consideration of other relevant and important factors such as the dose rate and specific stochastic end point (i.e., type of cancer or mutation). With this as a backdrop, the historical development and gyrations that led to the LNT as it is currently applied (or, some would say, misapplied) in radiological protection can be examined in the context of current scientific thinking with respect to radiation effects. It is not the purpose of this paper to endorse any particular position or to take sides but rather to present the story in a factual and fair minded manner. Hopefully, what follows will successfully achieve this goal. Thus, this paper will briefly review the scientific bases and supporting studies that led to the development and acceptance of the LNT in health physics. It will briefly touch on such topics as hormesis and other studies, such as the classic work of the late Robley Evans, that clearly demonstrate a threshold and nonlinear response for certain stochastic effects such as osteogenic sarcoma, along with the plethora of studies that suggest or have been interpreted to indicate that for at least some end points (i.e., cancers), response to ionizing radiation is consistent with the LNT model