How Western national interest drives Ebola drug development

Ebola virus disease typically only occurs in rural and remote areas among resource-poor populations. Until the large, recent outbreak in West Africa, cases of the illness were a rarity. So the fact that we even have experimental drugs for the disease tells a story about how responses to global health crises are shaped by the social and political interests of the developed world. Major pharmaceutical companies have shown little interest in developing effective treatments for diseases such as this. There’s no incentive for the commercial risks of research and companies naturally prefer to focus on diseases that can sustain large markets of wealthy regular users. A similar inattention is suffered by people who have what are collectively known as neglected tropical diseases, which affect about a billion of the world’s poorest people. They cause death and ill-health but also entrench social and political disadvantage. Even though most are preventable, and easily treatable with appropriate resources. For those affected, the burden of these diseases, on average, equates to the loss of 56 years of healthy life through early death or chronic disability. Yet, the US Centers for Disease Control estimates that for 50 cents per year per person, the burden of neglected tropical diseases could be eliminated. So it seems a little incongruous that drugs for Ebola virus disease were in development at all, given the relatively small number of cases and the poverty of those most at risk of infection. Let’s consider the most advanced drug: ZMapp, which is produced by Mapp Biopharmaceuticals and is the experimental treatment the fuss has been about. The incentive for developing ZMapp was clearly not its broad commercial potential. Instead, it is for developing capacity for biodefence

It’s a dog’s life when man’s best friend becomes his fattest

A study published this morning in Nature offers further insight into how dogs became domesticated. The comparative analysis of human, canine and wolf genomes suggests that humans and dogs have evolved in parallel as a response to the increasingly starchy diets on offer after the agricultural revolution. Such a wholesale change in diet has not necessarily been benign for either species. As our waistlines have expanded, so have those of our pet animals. In fact, the rising incidence of obesity in humans and dogs seems to be linked; people at high risk of obesity are more likely to own and care for an overweight canine companion

Narrative medicine: learning through stories

viewpointAnimal owners typically speak as storytellers: they communicate concerns about their animals through a narrative. I argue that, rather than being a distraction, a better understanding of the nature of storytelling can help veterinarians build relationships that are both morally and clinically valuable

Canines, Consanguinity, and One-Medicine: All the Qualities of a Dog except Loyalty

The rise of pet culture and the expansion of medical science occurred concurrently in the late–nineteenth century. From this time in Anglo-American societies dogs were simultaneously valorised as ‘man’s best friend’ and the ‘ideal model’ for experimental medicine. By tracking the hounds into our laboratories and onto the settee, changes in our conception of the properties of blood and canine breeding can be used to excavate covert connections between the contradictory social and scientific utilisations of this species. Describing the movement of genealogical and medical knowledge between the bench-top, the kennel and the clinic illustrates how Rudolph Virchow’s earlier promotion of a concept of ‘one-medicine’ foreshadowed the twentieth-century concomitant development and intermingling of the biomedical sciences and a sophisticated companion animal medical expertise

Narrative medicine: learning through stories

Animal owners typically speak as storytellers: they communicate concerns about their animals through a narrative. I argue that, rather than being a distraction, a better understanding of the nature of storytelling can help veterinarians build relationships that are both morally and clinically valuable

“It was not just a walking experience”: reflections on the role of care in dog-walking.

Research into physical activity and human health has recently begun to attend to dog-walking. This study extends the literature on dog-walking as a health behaviour by conceptualizing dog-walking as a caring practice. It centers on qualitative interviews with 11 Canadian dog-owners. All participants resided in urban neighbourhoods identified through previous quantitative research as conducive to dog-walking. Canine characteristics, including breed and age, were found to influence people’s physical activity. The health of the dog and its position in the life-course influenced patterns of dog-walking. Frequency, duration and spatial patterns of dog-walking all depended on relationships and people’s capacity to tap into resources. In foregrounding networks of care, inclusive of pets and public spaces, a relational conceptualization of dog-walking as a practice of caring helps to make sense of heterogeneity in patterns of physical activity amongst dog-owners. Keywords Dog-walking; physical activity; dog care; human-animal relationship; relational approachesThis work was supported by a New Investigator award from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and a Population Health Investigator award from Alberta Innovates - Health Solutions (AI-HS, funded by the Alberta Heritage Medical Research Foundation Endowment) to Melanie Rock. Chris Degeling’s position at VELiM is part supported by an Alberta Innovates - Health Solutions Incentive Grant to Melanie Rock. Funding to carry out the research that led to our sampling strategy came from a Canadian Institutes of Health Research Operating Grant (principal investigator, Alan Shiell)

Public Health Ethics and a Status for Pets as Person-Things: Revisiting the Place of Animals in Urbanized Societies.

Within the field of medical ethics, discussions related to public health have mainly concentrated on issues that are closely tied to research and practice involving technologies and professional services, including vaccination, screening, and insurance coverage. Broader determinants of population health have received less attention, although this situation is rapidly changing. Against this backdrop, our specific contribution to the literature on ethics and law vis-à-vis promoting population health is to open up the ubiquitous presence of pets within cities and towns for further discussion. An expanding body of research suggests that pet animals are deeply relevant to people’s health (negatively and positively). Pet bylaws adopted by town and city councils have largely escaped notice, yet they are meaningful to consider in relation to everyday practices, social norms, and cultural values, and thus in relation to population health. Nevertheless, not least because they pivot on defining pets as private property belonging to individual people, pet bylaws raise emotionally charged ethical issues that have yet to be tackled in any of the health research on pet ownership. The literature in moral philosophy on animals is vast, and we do not claim to advance this field here. Rather, we pragmatically seek to reconcile philosophical objections to pet ownership with both animal welfare and public health. In doing so, we foreground theorizations of personhood and property from sociocultural anthropology. Keywords : Anthropology; Philosophy; Ethics; Public health; Urban health; PetsCanadian Institutes of Health Research, Open Operating Gran

Hendra in the news: public policy meets public morality at a time of zoonotic uncertainty

Public discourses have influence on policymaking for emerging health issues. Media representations of unfolding events, scientific uncertainty, and real and perceived risks shape public acceptance of health policy and therefore policy outcomes. To characterize and track views in popular circulation on the causes, consequences and appropriate policy responses to the emergence of Hendra virus as a zoonotic risk, this study examines coverage of this issue in Australian mass media for the period 2007–2011. Results demonstrate the predominant explanation for the emergence of Hendra became the encroachment of flying fox populations on human settlement. Depictions of scientific uncertainty as to whom and what was at risk from Hendra virus promoted the view that flying foxes were a direct risk to human health. Descriptions of the best strategy to address Hendra have become polarized between recognized health authorities advocating individualized behaviour changes to limit risk exposure; versus populist calls for flying fox control and eradication. Less than a quarter of news reports describe the ecological determinants of emerging infectious disease or upstream policy solutions. Because flying foxes rather than horses were increasingly represented as the proximal source of human infection, existing policies of flying fox protection became equated with government inaction; the plight of those affected by flying foxes representative of a moral failure. These findings illustrate the potential for health communications for emerging infectious disease risks to become entangled in other political agendas, with implications for the public's likelihood of supporting public policy and risk management strategies that require behavioural change or seek to address the ecological drivers of incidence. Keywords: Australia; Health communication; Hendra virus; Media; Content analysis; Public policyNHMRC Centre for Research Excellence in Critical and Emerging Infectious Diseas

Of mice and men: role of mice in biomedical research questioned

A study recently published in the peer-reviewed journal PNAS (Proceedings of the National of Academy Sciences) shows that mice are poor models for human inflammatory diseases. The paper, which focused on sepsis, burns and trauma, raises questions about the fundamental role of mice in biomedical research. Bodily responses to burn injuries and acute infections look similar in mice and humans, but the study authors found they’re driven by fundamentally different genetic and molecular mechanisms. They spent ten years examining which genes in human white blood cells are activated during infection. Data from 167 patients suggested there are particular patterns of genomic change associated with acute inflammation. After having their paper rejected by several journals, the researchers decided to redesign their study. Apparently, one objection from reviewers was that the results had not been validated by mouse studies. But when the researchers looked at the genomic response to different forms of inflammation in mice, they made a number of startling discoveries: 1. The relatively uniform gene changes found in human patients were not found in mice. 2. Genomic changes in mice were completely different to humans, and there was no discernible pattern of gene modification. 3. None of the mouse models for sepsis, bacterial blood poisoning, trauma or burns predicted the magnitude or direction of inflammation in humans. These findings have significant ramification

Underdetermined Interests: Scientific ‘Goods’ and Animal Welfare.

It is well known that the culture within which actors such as scientists and clinicians operate is structured by the mechanisms through which institutional rewards are distributed (Garfield 1979). In the biosciences, citation counts are the accepted markers of a researcher's originality and competence that permit access to funding, promotion and other forms of institutional support. Osborne and colleagues' (2009) study suggests that beneath this publication-driven reward system is a widespread indifference on the part of journals to the ethical/welfare issues that surround the use of animals for the purposes of science. Although the promotion of animal welfare is not necessarily a goal of the vast majority of scientific research, it is arguable that those who distribute the institutional rewards should also be accountable for the harms that occur during efforts directed at their attainment. Other studies of the effects of the dictum “publish or perish” on medicine and sciences such as psychology and ecology indicate that within this professional structure of reward through publication, editorial policies are one of the few levers that can rapidly affect a wholesale change to research practices (Fidler et al. 2004). Consequently the move to assign some responsibility to journals for the maintenance and promotion of animal welfare is a simple but significant step that could change the way the biosciences utilize non-human animals. Although we heartily commend Osborne and colleagues (2009) because their study should provoke some worthwhile ideas and their proposal has a great deal of merit, we believe that any change to editorial policies could, and in fact should, be extended to address other concerns beyond improving animal welfare. Our position is that any editorial prescription for what constitutes ‘good’ animalbased science should also ensure that scientists are aware that the ethical permissibility of their research depends in part on the purpose for which it is undertaken, and the just distribution of any benefits