Looking Ahead: Addressing Ethical Challenges in Public Health Practice

Ethical challenges in public health can have a significant impact on the health of communities if they impede efficiencies and best practices. Competing needs for resources and a plurality of values can challenge public health policymakers and practitioners to make fair and effective decisions for their communities. In this paper, the authors offer an analytic framework designed to assist policymakers and practitioners in managing the ethical tensions they face in daily practice. Their framework is built upon the following set of six considerations: determining population-level utility of the proposed action; demonstrating evidence of need and effectiveness of actions; establishing fairness of goals and proposed implementation strategies; ensuring accountability; and, assessing expected efficiencies and costs associated with the proposed action. Together, these considerations create a structured guide to assist decision-makers in identifying potential ethical challenges and in assessing the moral considerations that underlie public health practice - and possibly even, if the conditions are met, reduce the creation of ethical tension. Although the authors'empirical experiences provide the basis for the framework advanced here, their approach remains to be tested and evaluated by public health practitioners.     

Still Just Rhetoric? Judicial Discretion and Due Process

Judicial discretion is crucial in determining whether, in practice, those accused of crimes experience the protection of due process safeguards during the trial process. In this article, two examples of evidential rules and their judicial interpretation are examined. They are assessed in the context of the common critique that discretion is utilised primarily to the effect of denying due process protections in practice. This analysis takes place in the particular context of the punitive turn in the politics of criminal justice. A detailed examination of the interpretation of s114(1)(d) and s101(1)(d) in conjunction with s101(3) of the Criminal Justice Act 2003, regulating the admission of hearsay and bad character evidence, is carried out in order to gain insight into the modern role of judicial discretion. Conclusions are drawn by proposing some theoretical models of the relationship between statutory content, the interpretation of those provisions and the effects of these on the experience of defendants in criminal trials.     

“Good and Evil” narratives in Islamic State media and Western government statements

This article uses a critical discourse and documentary analysis to explore “Good and Evil” narratives in Islamic State (IS) media and in the official policy statements of the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom. The analysis initially considers how IS and Western governments define the other as “Evil” drawing from premodern Manichean and Abrahamic religious conventions. It then interprets how these entities subscribe to a post-Enlightenment ethic that associates the triumph of “Good” over “Evil” with science, reason and technological innovation. Distinct from similar analyses that emphasise the persuasive power of religion, this article reflects on how IS and Western governments use conflicting religious and philosophical imperatives to articulate their strategic political agendas. It further interprets how these agendas become ideologically convincing, through reflexive communication.     

Immigrant protest: an introduction

The last decade has witnessed an explosion of ‘immigrant protests’, political mobilizations by irregular migrants and pro-migrant activists. This special issue on ‘immigrant protest’ has emerged in response to this rise in the visibility of immigrant protests, and its central aim is to contribute to the growing body of scholarship on migrant resistance movements and to consider the implications of these struggles for critical understandings of citizenship. This introduction maps out some of the central issues and themes emerging from the contributions to this issue, exploring the tensions between integrationist and autonomous approaches and theories of migrant activism and resistance and between migrant and activist strategies of invisibility and visibility. By bringing immigrant protests to the heart of debates about citizenship, we hope to further extend discussions about the limits and the possibilities of citizenship as the material and conceptual horizon of critical social analysis and political participation and practice today.     

Naked protest: the maternal politics of citizenship and revolt

This article explores immigrant protest, citizenship and their relationship, through an account of a ‘naked protest’ by a group of mothers, refused asylum seekers and ‘illegal immigrants’ at Yarl's Wood immigration removal centre in England and ends with an account of the use of the ‘naked curse’ in a protest by an indigenous group of mothers against global oil corporations in the Niger Delta. Woven together from activist materials, news reports, interviews, documentaries and historical data, I recount and mobilise these protests to think about ‘the scaling of bodies’ (Marion-Young 1990) and citizenship under neoliberalism, and the routes through which motherhood is mobilised as a site of political agency and resistance to processes of disenfranchisement. I argue that these maternal protests challenge the ‘catastrophic functionalism’ of Agamben-inspired accounts of ‘bare life’, and offer an alternative lens through which to perceive the ethical and political claims made by abject populations (Papadopoulos et al. 2008, p. 198). In thinking through and with these naked protests, this article reframes the sexual politics of citizenship and brings questions of maternity and natality to bear on citizenship studies.     

The Effect of Light Exposure on the Degradation of Latent Fingerprints on Brass Surfaces: The Use of Silver Electroless Deposition as a Visualization Technique

We have studied the degradation of sebaceous fingerprints on brass surfaces using silver electroless deposition (SED) as a visualization technique. We have stored fingerprints on brass squares either (i) in a locked dark cupboard or (ii) in glass‐filtered natural daylight for periods of 3 h, 24 h, 1 week, 3 weeks, and 6 weeks. We find that fingerprints on brass surfaces degrade much more rapidly when kept in the light than they do under dark conditions with a much higher proportion of high‐quality prints found after 3 or 6 weeks of aging when stored in the dark. This process is more marked than for similar fingerprints on black PVC surfaces. Identifiable prints can be achieved on brass surfaces using both SED and cyanoacrylate fuming (CFM). SED is quick and straightforward to perform. CFM is more time‐consuming but is versatile and can be applied to a wider range of metal surfaces than SED, for example brass surfaces which have been coated by a lacquer.     

Responding to the immunoglobulin shortage: a case study

In fall 1997, a shortage of intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIG) developed in the United States because of increased demand for the product, reduced supply, and product recalls. This shortage is a useful model for understanding how our health care system responds to scarcity. Although the U.S. government took steps to inform the medical community of the shortage, with few exceptions, the government did not respond to the shortage in a timely or effective manner. Instead, it took a relatively passive role, leaving IVIG manufacturers and distributors, health care institutions, and clinicians to fend for themselves. The shortage likely had an uneven impact on patients, based on the relative market strength of the health care institutions in which they received care and the individual patient's ability to absorb the increasing out-of-pocket costs of scarce IVIG. Market mechanisms have now largely alleviated the shortage and significantly reduced its detrimental impact on patients. However, future shortages of IVIG or other scarce medical products, such as vaccines and antibiotics, would benefit from more immediate and coordinated efforts not only to make sure that scarce health care resources are distributed in a just manner but also to identify and remedy the sources of health product supply problems.