International disaster identification report. Investigative and dental aspects

This meeting, held in October 1980 in Apeldoorn, Netherlands, was a very serious effort to begin international cooperation in a much needed area: disaster investigation and identification. Under the leadership of Col. Arie van den Bos of the Royal Police of the Netherlands, the work was accomplished with representatives and observers from many major countries represented. Efforts were made to solve the enigma of international cooperation. A plane crash of an airline of a major country in a distant country can be properly investigated only with the cooperation of the carrier and the country in which the tragedy occurred. The International Academy of Legal Medicine and Social Medicine devoted a 3-day program to the study of this problem during their last international meeting in Lyon, France, and it will be discussed further in Vienna in 1982 under the leadership of Prof. Wilhelm Holczabek. The experience of Norwegian investigators is mentioned as an example of the type of problems encountered with foreign nationals involved in a crash in the country, or a disaster involving a ship or a oil platform where foreign nationals are working, or in a tragedy such as the propylene explosion in Tarragona, Spain, which resulted in more than 200 tourists from many countries dying in the fire, many bodies burned beyond recognition.     

A variable geometry of enforcement?

This paper locates the control of fraud against the Community budget within the wider context of the tensions engendered by fiscal crises and successive enlargements of the European Union. Funds allocated to the Member States for agriculture, whether in the form of subventions or structural grants, take up more than half of total budget expenditure, so the Common Agricultural Policy has been at the heart of the discussion on budgetary control. Since the 1980s the Common Agricultural Policy has been blamed for the repeated fiscal crises affecting the Community budget, and for frauds and irregularities. In this historical context, the control of fraud has not been static, but has gone through distinct phases, beginning with benign neglect in the 1960s and 70s, followed by transitional and active phases up to and including today's media focus on the Community budget, and the fraud affecting it. The paper analyses the prospects for future enforcement.     

THE STATUTORY CORPORATION—A NOTE ON THE THEORY OF AUTONOMY

Readers of this journal, especially those who watch developments affecting the machinery of government in Canberra, will no doubt have noticed the rehabilitation of the concept of statutory independence—a notion that, in some academic circles, had been virtually written off as having little or no relevance in the real world, where the general tendency has been towards an extension of government control and co-ordination of bureaucratic systems. Although it is much too early to evaluate, with suitable scholarly detachment, the significance of the administrative changes initiated since December, 1972, it seems a safe observation that for a small group of government agencies at least, the Labor Government has committed itself to the idea of independence. This much is clear from its declared aim of giving the Australian Broadcasting Commission more autonomy and the decision, recently announced, to reconstitute the Postmaster-General's Department into two separate statutory corporations.     

A contribution to the improvement of accuracy in the quantitation of THC.

The accuracy of a quantitative analysis is highly dependent on the quality of the reference standard. Although reference standards are more and more supplied with a certificate, laboratories may feel the need for additional acceptance testing. In general, confirmation of the purity of many solid reference substances can be obtained by a number of simple tests. However, verification of the true content of reference solutions may be complicated. A number of problems with the THC quantitation caused our interest for a verification method for the THC reference solution. The quantitation of THC is performed by gas chromatography with flame ionisation detector. The effective carbon number concept was used to predict GC/FID response factors. Equations and data are presented to calculate theoretical response ratios of cannabinoids. The experimental data for CBD and CBN were in excellent agreement with the theoretical ones. The paper shows that the response factors of CBD and/or CBN can be used for the calculation of the THC content of either reference solutions or cannabis samples.     

Intellectual Property and Global Health: From Corporate Social Responsibility to the Access to Knowledge Movement

Any system for the protection of intellectual property rights (IPRs) has three main kinds of distributive effects. It will determine or influence: (a) the types of objects that will be developed and for which IPRs will be sought; (b) the differential access various people will have to these objects; and (c) the distribution of the IPRs themselves among various actors. What this means to the area of pharmaceutical research is that many urgently needed medicines will not be developed at all, that the existing medicines will not be suitable for countries with a precarious health infrastructure or not target the disease variety that is prevalent in poorer regions. Such effects are commonly captured under the rubric of the “10/90 gap” in biomedical research. High prices will also restrict access to medicines as well endanger compliance to treatment schemes. IPRs are mainly held by multinational corporations situated in the developed world, which not only raises egalitarian concerns, but also severely limits the possibilities of companies in poorer countries to realize improvements on existing inventions, as they cannot financially afford to secure freedom to operate, which systematically shrinks the number of potential innovators. Those inequities lead to an enormous burden for the global poor and since no institution is willing to assume the responsibility to fulfil the right to health and the corresponding right of access to essential medicines, we have to analyse alternatives or additions to the actual intellectual property regimes in order to create new incentives to fill this gap.     

Public bads and private firms: efficiency and sustainability with different allocations of voting rights

A number of authors have proposed that firms can internalize externalities through their shareholders. This paper investigates this proposition, focusing on public bads. Theoretically it is, indeed, possible that shareholders decide that the firm reduces its public bads at the cost of profits, thereby increasing Pareto-efficiency. One of the factors which help determine the size of the reduction is the number of shareholders with a (very) small stake in the firm. The greater this number, the greater the reduction will tend to be. It is shown that the reduction in public bads can be reversed by takeovers, but under special conditions only while takeover defences may also be used. Unfortunately, there are a number of factors which significantly limit the internalization of external effects in practice. The paper also discusses a change in the legal share-voting system whereby the direct owners of the shares (i.e., the shareholders) no longer possess, in their capacity of direct owners, the legal right to vote at the General Meetings of firm owners. Instead, these rights become the property of the beneficial owners of the shares (i.e., the people who ultimately provided the money to buy the shares), but on the condition that they delegate their voting rights to a proxy voting institution. This institutional innovation may significantly increase the internalization of external effects among other things because many beneficial owners have a tiny stake in the firm.     

The London Agreement and the cost of patenting in Europe

This paper analyses the consequences for the European patent system of the recently ratified London Agreement, which aims to reduce the translation requirements for patent validation procedures in 15 out of 34 national patent offices. The simulations suggest that the cost of patenting has been reduced by 20–30% since the enforcement of the LA. With an average translation cost saving of €3,600 per patent, the total savings for the business sector amount to about €220 millions. The fee elasticity of patents being about −0.4, one may expect an increase in patent filings of 8–12%. Despite the translation cost savings, the relative cost of a European patent validated in six (thirteen) countries is still at least five (seven) times higher than in the United States.