Accountability e desenho institucional: um ponto cego no Direito Público brasileiro

O objetivo do presente artigo é propor uma base mais sólida ao conceito de accountability, que seja mais adequada para disciplinar seu uso, especialmente por parte da literatura jurídica, o que pode ser alcançado, metodologicamente, a partir da mobilização de um conceito minimalista para a abordagem, tanto normativa quanto empírica, deste fenômeno. Clareza conceitual é fator indispensável para esclarecer termos genéricos e multifacetados como accountability

International law of climate change and accountability

In the past few decades, accountability has become a key concept to assess the role and place of a wide range of trasnational institutions. Such trend can be partially explained by the widespread sense of unaccountability that permeates the legal realm beyond the state. The aim of this thesis is to investigate three particular institutional actors of the Climate Change Regime: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the Compliance Committee of the Kyoto Protocol (CCKP), and the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). This investigation is carried out through the descriptive and critical lenses of accountability. It resorts to the Global Administrative Law (GAL) project in order to pursue that task. Along the way, the thesis asks four interrelated research questions. The first is conceptual: what is accountability? The second is an abstract normative question: what is regarded as a desirable accountability relationship at the national and the global level? The third is purely descriptive: how accountable are the three institutions? The fourth, finally, is a contextualised normative question: how appropriate are their three accountability arrangements? The two former questions are instrumental and ancillary to the two latter. That is to say, they respectively provide the analytical and evaluative frameworks on the basis of which a concrete description and a concrete normative assessment will be done

Bronchiolitis Admissions in a Lebanese Tertiary Medical Center: A 10 Years' Experience

Bronchiolitis and more specifically respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) bronchiolitis is a leading cause of global childhood morbidity and mortality. Despite the previous identification of possible risk factors associated with the severity of bronchiolitis, the data from Lebanon remains limited. We described the burden of bronchiolitis hospitalizations in children under 5 years of age in a tertiary care center in Lebanon from October 2004 to October 2014 and identified the risk factors associated with severe bronchiolitis. This was a retrospective cohort study conducted at the American University of Beirut Medical Center. Records of children younger than 5 years of age admitted with a diagnosis of bronchiolitis were reviewed. More than half the patients were RSV positive. RSV bronchiolitis was found to be significantly associated with longer hospital stay compared to children with non-RSV bronchiolitis (P = 0.007). Children exposed to smoking had an increased risk for longer hospital stay (P = 0.002) and were more likely to require ICU admission (P < 0.001) and supplemental oxygen (P = 0.045). Congenital heart disease was found to be a significant risk factor for severe bronchiolitis (P < 0.005).Conclusion: Patients with RSV bronchiolitis had a longer hospital stay compared to patients with non-RSV bronchiolitis. Exposure to smoking was associated with a more severe and complicated RSV infection. Congenital heart disease was the only risk factor significantly associated with all markers of bronchiolitis disease severity

Who is responsible for Brazil’s COVID-19 catastrophe?

Despite being relatively well-placed to combat COVID-19, Brazil now has one of the highest death rates in the world. Often seen as a problem of coordination between levels of government, the real issue has been federal-level failures that stem back to a pre-existing political crisis. This catastrophic, top-down mishandling of the pandemic has effectively neutralised the strengths and often heroic efforts of the national healthcare system, write Gabriela Lotta (FGV), Michelle Fernandez (Universidade de Brasília), Deisy Ventura (Universidade de São Paulo), Danielle Rached (FGV), Melania Amorim (Universidade Federal de Campina Grande), Lorena Barberia (Universidade de São Paulo), Tatiane Moraes (Fiocruz), and Clare Wenham (LSE Health Policy)