bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Injury Prevention as a Public Health Responsibility: The New York State Department of Health Injury Control Program
Authors: Standfast Susan J. 
Published: June 2007

In December 1986 the New York State Commissioner of Health, David Axelrod, MD, designated an Injury Control Program within the Division of Epidemiology. This action was in recognition of the importance of injuries as a major public health problem in New York State. The public health importance of injuries is highlighted by the fact that injury particularly affects young and productive members of society as well as the poor and needy who make up the traditional clientele of public health departments. Injury is the leading cause of death in persons under age 35 in New York State and accounts for more years of potential life lost before age 65 than cancer, heart disease or AIDS (Figure 1). Injury is the fourth leading cause of death for all ages and a major cause of hospitalization and disability.The New York State Health Department's authority to engage in injury control activities derives from four sources: the general powers and duties of the Health Commissioner as described in the New York Public Health Law; specific provisions of the law which direct the Department to engage in discrete injury-related activities, such as burn treatment and poison control; executive orders of the Governor, such as Executive Order #35 establishing the Governor’s Advisory Council on Highway Safety; and the authority of the Public Health Council to promulgate a State Sanitary Code which includes requirements for operation of swimming pools and bathing beaches, temporary residences (including children’s camps), regulations for emergency medical services, and so forth. The Injury Control Program’s major functions are based on the Department’s general authority.
Alcohol, Injury, and Legal Controls: Some Complex Interactions
Authors: Hingson Ralph , Howland Jonathan 
Published: June 2007

Despite considerable declines in the early 1980’s, drunk driving remains a major public health problem in the US. In 1986, 46,050 people were killed on the nation's highways. Traffic crashes are the leading cause of death in the age group 1-34 years. Alcohol is unquestionably a major contributor to these crashes. In 1986, 23,987 traffic deaths, 52 percent of the total, involved a driver or pedestrian who had been drinking, and 16,728, 36 percent of the total, involved someone with a blood alcohol level above 10 percent. Many of the victims of drunk driving crashes were not drinking at the time of the event; more than one third of alcohol related vehicular deaths were persons other than drinking drivers: passengers, other drivers or pedestrians.Legislation may influence drinking and driving behavior, and the consequences thereof, in a variety of ways: limiting access to alcohol; restricting access to vehicles; making vehicles and roadways safer; separating drinking and driving. Taxation, dram shop laws, minimum drinking ages, server liability, land use laws pertaining to the location of alcohol outlets, and prohibitions on advertising alcoholic beverages affect the driver's access to alcohol.
Fires, Cigarettes and Advocacy
Authors: McGuire Andrew 
Published: June 2007

America is burning at a faster rate than any other industrialized nation. Approximately 2.3 million fires costing $40 billion were reported in 1984. Over 5,400 American citizens are killed as a result of these fires and an estimated 130,000 are seriously injured. The leading cause of fire death and injury is cigarette initiated fires with the 1984 toll being 1,570 deaths and 7,000 serious injuries.’ Property damage alone totals over $390 million.These numbers do not portray the human devastation caused by fires. No other injury causes more pain and suffering. Movies, television and radio have rarely documented the emotional and physical sequelae of a severe burn injury. One day's headline proclaims the devastation of a house fire, and then the story disappears at the point when the survivors begin the agonizing process of healing. The daily routine of burn treatment in America's burn centers is hidden from public view.
On Touching “The Happy Isles”: Reflections about Past, Future, and Present
Authors: Katz Jay 
Published: June 2007

Ever since I learned a year ago about the honor you intended to bestow upon me, I have asked myself: What is it in my life's work that led you to confer upon me your Second Presidents' Award? You could have chosen many other, perhaps more deserving, recipients. But tonight I do not wish to compare myself to others. It would be most ungracious to charge you with being mistaken, or too self-effacing to charge myself with being unworthy of your Award.Ultimately, I concluded that you honor me less for the work I have published and more for the impact I have had on so many of you as your teacher and colleague during the last thirty years. I have lived my life with people—family, friends, students. I have cherished, and still cherish, the contacts with my students, a remarkable number of whom soon became collaborators, colleagues, friends or took off on their own, enriching in significant ways what we had first learned together.
Do-Not-Resuscitate Orders: Public Policy and Patient Autonomy
Authors: Miller Tracy E. 
Published: June 2007

The issuance of do-not-resuscitate orders was one of the first dilemmas scrutinized by lawyers, health care professionals and philosophers in the field of bioethics. In 1983, the President's Commission articulated the basic principles that should guide decisions about CPR: respect for the choices of patients capable of deciding for themselves, recognition of family members as appropriate surrogates for decisionally incapable patients and the importance of an open dialogue with the physician as a predicate to informed consent.Six years have passed since the President's Commission issued its landmark report. More than a decade of discussion and written commentary has clarified the ethical and social questions presented by resuscitation decisions. In many states, judicial decisions and legislation have addressed some of the legal uncertainties associated with do-not-resuscitate (DNR) orders. Nonetheless, the gulf between recognized ethical principles and clinical practice remains broad and resistant to change. Nowhere is this gap more evident than in decisions about cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) for competent patients.
New Jersey's “Granny Doe” Squad: Arguments about Mechanisms for Protection of Vulnerable Patients
Authors: Price David M. , Armstrong Paul W. 
Published: June 2007

A decision not to hospitalize, dialyze or resuscitate a dying, elderly, nursing home resident is regarded as “possible abuse.” Any physician, nurse, administrator, social worker, aide or other staff member who learns of plans to withhold treatment is required to report this fact to a state official. That official will conduct an investigation “to determine whether the legal guidelines...are satisfied.” While the often protracted investigation is pending, “the facility itself (must) preserve the patient's health.”A letter declaring this to be the requirement of current New Jersey law was recently sent to administrators of all nursing homes and psychiatric hospitals by the state's Office of the Ombudsman for the Institutionalized Elderly.The policy has provoked strong protests from health professional organizations and advocates for the privacy of patients and families. Alert clinicians are reportedly maneuvering to place their patients beyond the Ombudsman's reach.
Making Universal Health Insurance Work in Massachusetts
Authors: Sager Alan 
Published: June 2007

High U.S. health costs have been one of the main barriers to enacting universal access to care in recent decades. It is therefore surprising that Massachusetts, with the nation's highest per capita health spending, last year promised health insurance to all citizens. Declaring that “the access of residents of the Commonwealth to basic health care services is a natural, essential, and unalienable right” protected by the Massachusetts Constitution, the new health law, Chapter 23 of the Acts of 1988, legislates a promise that insurance be offered to all by 1 April 1992.The law was the product of almost three years of bargaining. One closely involved person said this was “the most controversial and heavily fought battle in the past 25 years in the Massachusetts State House.” Deals had to be struck. Perhaps the most important of the law's compromises is embodied in its title: “An Act to Make Health Security Available to All Citizens of the Commonwealth and to Improve Hospital Financing.” Obtaining the votes for the law's universal access provisions required promising Massachusetts hospitals substantially higher revenues.
On Heroes and Villains in the Linares Drama
Authors: Mitchell Christine 
Published: June 2007

The Linares case is one of the memorable moral dramas played out in a pediatric intensive care unit and in the press in a decade of momentous moral cases concerning the care of children. It was a vivid tragedy that posed intense conflict. Its characters were sharply drawn, and it culminated in a final, dramatic scene.High drama tends toward heroes who are admired for their courage and distinguished performance, and villains who are embodiments of evil reviled for their wickedness. To make it simple for the audience, the good often wear white and the bad wear black. Not so in this story. Two nurses who took care of Samuel Linares, Karen Stratton and Laura Stark, wrote, ‘‘The media sensationalized Rudy Linares as a hero while Rush PICU staff members were portrayed as the villains. Who is right?”’Nurses played a central role in the Linares case. Accounts of the drama in newspapers, television stories, and articles across the country contained opening paragraphs giving the basic facts: Rudy Linares, a 23-year-old laborer, held nurses at gunpoint just after midnight on April 26, 1989, while he disconnected his 16-month-old unconscious son, Samuel, from a respirator at Rush Presbyterian St. Luke's Hospital in Chicago and held him in his arms until he died.
The Malpractice Standard under Health Care Cost Containment
Authors: Hall Mark A. 
Published: June 2007

For decades, medicine has been dominated by a “spare-no-expense’’ philosophy that fostered an ethic of providing all care that is of any conceivable benefit, regardless of the cost. This extended financial honeymoon has now ended. Sweeping reimbursement reform is limiting payment for health care under both public programs and private insurance. As physicians respond to this emerging cost consciousness in health care by declining to perform procedures once considered necessary, will they be exposed to liability or will legal standards shift to accommodate the new constraints? This dilemma is one of the most important issues that will confront health care tort law throughout the remainder of the century.The potential conflict between malpractice law and cost containment has received considerable scholarly attention over the past dozen years, particularly following the 1983 reform of the Medicare program and the 1986 California appellate decision in Wickline v. State of California concerning that state's Medicaid program.
Stratified Scarcity: Redefining the Standard of Care
Authors: Morreim E. Haavi 
Published: June 2007

Professor Hall is to be congratulated on his thoughtful analysis of an issue that, as he rightly suggests, “is one of the most important issues that will confront health care tort law throughout the remainder of the century.”’ He argues that malpractice law currently can accommodate considerable latitude both for a conservative streamlining of medical practices in general and for a cost-sensitivity in individual treatment decisions. And he further argues that existing tort principles, such as the locality rule, can comfortably be stretched to embrace still greater room for economics in the medical standard of care. I quite agree.Unfortunately, Hall's arguments do not go nearly far enough, for they are framed around a seriously oversimplified picture of the economic changes that are revolutionizing medicine in the United States. He envisions a fairly uniform, global set of resource constraints that generally pressure physicians to conserve on care—pressures that tort law can then encompass equally globally as it accepts more cost-efficient standards of care. However, neither the changing economics of medicine nor the resulting jurisprudential challenges are anywhere near this generalized.
Realism, Law and Aging
Authors: Cohen Elias S. 
Published: June 2007

In 1962, theJournal of law and Contemporary Problemsdevoted its entire winter issue to aging. The remarkable thing about that issue was that it had only one article that dealt with legal questions—and that with tax treatment of the elderly. The remainder of the issue contained articles dealing with the demographic and sociological characteristics of the elderly, currently held views and theories of aging and human development, and some special concerns from other disciplines like geriatric psychiatry.In less than a generation, old age and the law has evolved into a field of study of consuming interest to legal scholars, practitioners, sociologists, and consumers. The Chicago-Kent Law Library established a special catalog of the law and aging in 1983. By 1987 (the year in which the last entries were made for the collection), the catalog had grown to over 500 pages. Earlier (1982) theSouthern Culifornia Law Reviewpublished a similar catalog which was updated in 1984 and 1987.
The Fear of Liability and the Use of Restraints in Nursing Homes
Authors: Johnson Sandra H. 
Published: June 2007

The routine use of chemical and physical restraints in nursing homes is bad care. Medical and nursing literature on the care of nursing home patients consistently criticizes the use of restraints when that use is unrelated to diagnosis and treatment considerations. Federal and state laws have included restrictions on the use of restraints for some time. The criticisms of inappropriate and indiscriminate use of chemical and physical restraints are not new. What, then, supports their continued misuse despite the ordinarily powerful combination of professional and governmental approbation?The use of restraints responds to generally quite acceptable and desirable patient-oriented goals. Restraints are used in an attempt to protect the patient with physical or mental disabilities from avoidable injury caused by falling or wandering away from the facility. In the social context of nursing homes, restraints are also used to protect residents from injury by threatening, violent patients. When the rationale is measured against the known effects of restraints, however, the self-evident nature of the justification begins to break down.
State of the Law: Nursing Homes
Authors: Kapp Marshall B. 
Published: June 2007

Health care for the elderly, already a major social concern in the United States, is fated to become even more dominant on our social, political, and legal agendas. The effect on the nursing home industry and nursing home law will border on the revolutionary.In a review of the “prospects for an ageing population,” Jacob Brody observed that:In 1900, only a quarter of the U.S. population survived to the age of 65. Now almost 70 per cent achieve this age, and the proportion of those aged 80 and over is 30 per cent and increasing. Within a very few years, about half the population will live more than 80 years.A report of the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) notes the same trend and gives a sense of the numbers involved:The elderly population has grown from 4.0 percent of the total in 1900 to more than 11.5 percent in 1983. The number of those over 65 is projected to grow from today's 27 million to an estimated 39.3 million by 2010, when they will constitute almost 14 percent of the Nation's population. More significantly, between 2010 and 2020 the older population is expected to increase by more than 12 million….
Bioethics, ’89: Can Democracy Cope?
Authors: Kirby Michael 
Published: June 2007

This conference comes together at a critical time for law, ethics, and medicine. The issues which come under attention are of the greatest variety, complexity, sensitivity, and urgency.The topics span the whole of human life. They begin at a point before human life has commenced. The revolutionary developments of biology as they affect conception and the use and limits of reproductive and genetic techniques arrest our thoughts in section VI of this special issue ofLaw, Medicine&Health Care.The rationing of health care as it is made available to patients and the community is the focus of attention in section III. The subject of medical malpractice and the litigation which attends it where the patient or the family claim that things have gone wrong are considered in section II.The new challenge of AIDS is discussed with its many faceted problems: medical, legal, and ethical. It is difficult now to remember the world before AIDS.
Global Coordination of National Public Health Strategies
Authors: Mann Jonathan , Dam Marjorie , Kay Kathleen 
Published: June 2007

Three periods can be distinguished in the brief history of global AIDS: silence, discovery and mobilization. The first period, starting in the mid-l970s, was the time of the “silent pandemic,” during which HIV spread — unnoticed—to at least five continents. During this period, when the virus was unrecognized, HIV could have — but did not — spread even more widely.The description of AIDS in 1981 ended the silence and initiated the second period in the history of global AIDS — a period of discovery which culminated symbolically at the first International Conference on AIDS in June 1985 (Atlanta, USA). During this period, the modes of transmission were defined, the virus was discovered, and the capacity to detect anti-viral antibodies led to the discovery of large numbers of infected persons and to awareness of the long latency between infection and manifest disease.
Screening for HIV Infection and Public Health Policy
Authors: Fineberg Harvey V. 
Published: June 2007

The subject of screening stands at the intersection of medicine and public health and the law. Medicine is concerned about the care of the individual patient; public health focuses on maintaining and improving the health of entire populations. The law is concerned with the balance of rights and responsibilities, protecting society from errant individuals and protecting the individual from undue constraints of society.In looking specifically at the questions of screening or testing for the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) it is useful to consider the meaning of the words “tests” and “screening” because many different terms are applied to these concepts — diagnostic testing, case finding, screening, surveillance, and so on. In all cases, medical tests have a common purpose: to provide information that sheds light on the probability that the disease of interest actually is present in the patient being tested.
An Institutional Policy on the Right to Benefit from the Commercialization of Human Biological Material
Authors: Prentice Ernest D. , Wiltse John C. , Sharp John G. , Antonson Dean L. 
Published: June 2007

The marriage of academic research laboratories to the biotechnology industry has raised some very complex ethical and legal issues regarding commercialization of human body parts, products and derivatives thereof. Current statutes prohibit the sale of one's body or bodily organs although people may legally sell their blood or semen and are generally encouraged to donate certain body parts for transplantation or research both in life and death. No existing legislation, however, clearly addresses ownership rights with respect to human cells and tissues used in research, Commercialization of human biological material, either by the donor or by the recipient, e.g., researcher and/ or pharmaceutical company, is an uncharted area of the law.The question of proprietary rights to one's own cells and tissues did not arise until the biotechnology industry rapidly expanded in the 1980s. Now, human organs, tissues and cells are used in research that may lead to the development of products with tremendous commercial value.
Gestational Surrogacy and the Health Care Provider: Put Part of the “IVF Genie” Back into the Bottle
Authors: Rothenberg Karen H. 
Published: June 2007

Medical advances in new reproductive technologies continue to raise complex legal and ethical issues. Last October, a California Superior Court judge issued his opinion on the first contested case in this country involving gestational surrogacy. Upholding the surrogacy contract as valid and declaring that the genetic parents had exclusive custody and parental rights, Judge Richard Parslow observed:The IVF genie is out of the bottle and you’re not going to be able to put it back.I contend that we must put part of the genie back into the bottle. Gestational surrogacy is not an acceptable option for the extension of in vitro fertilization (IVF). This is not a reaction to the facts of the California case, but rather a recognition that the medicalization of surrogacy as a reproductive technology attempts to legitimize a practice that professionals should not support.
Public Policy in the Wake ofCruzan: A Case Study of New York's Health Care Proxy Law
Authors: Miller Tracy E. 
Published: June 2007

On June 25,1990, seven years after Nancy Cruzan lapsed into permanent unconsciousness following a car accident, the United States Supreme Court handed down its landmark decision inCruzan v. Director, Missouri Department of Health.The decision provided the Court's first ruling on the right to forgo life-sustaining treatment, addressing both the right of individuals to decide for themselves and the right of family members to decide on their behalf.Inextricably linked to the Court's holding on individual rights were questions about the authority and responsibility of each state to fashion policy for treatment decisions on behalf of incompetent patients. TheCruzuncase presented an opportunity for the Court to comment upon and reshape the patchwork of laws that define the right to decide about life-sustaining treatment in states across the country.
Medical Determination (and Preservation) of Decision-Making Capacity
Authors: Howe Edmund G. , Gordon Daniel S. , Valentin Manuel 
Published: June 2007

A recent case report described a 62-year-old woman who had suffered a stroke and subsequently had global aphasia, hemiplegia, and could not respond consistently to yes-no questions. She remained hospitalized for four years and throughout this period was irritable, uncooperative, and often refused food. Her care providers considered it very likely that she was depressed and treated her with antidepressant medication, but these drugs did not have beneficial effect.Her situation subsequently deteriorated. She refused food and water to a greater extent and lost 22 pounds over one month. At that time electroconvulsive therapy was instituted. Thereafter, presumably responding to electroconvulsive therapy, she became pleasant and cooperative and drank and ate heartily.