MEDGuide and patient package inserts--again?

This article will trace the history and effects of the PPI from the time of its original concept by the FDA in the early 1970's to its current status. It will also address the response to this FDA initiative by the industry, medical community and consumer groups. Initiatives in other countries and future issues will also be discussed.     

Intraparty Hostility: Social Identity,Subidentity, and the Hostile Media Effect in a Contested Primary

The hostile media effect (HME) has generally been tested in terms of in-groups and out-groups, with a “neutral” story in between. This ignores the nature of many social groups as comprising subgroups, often but not always sharing feelings of connectedness and purpose. In cases when bounded subgroups are at odds with one another, HME provides little guidance. A contested partisan primary provides such a case. This study takes identity centrality, candidate favorability, and perceived social network homogeneity as measures of partisanship and involvement, hypothesizing relationships between each and perceived bias against one’s candidate and party. Findings show that markers of candidate-focused social identity predict greater perceived bias against one’s candidate during the 2016 primary season, while party-focused identity fails to predict perceived bias against one’s party. This suggests that candidate support identity overrides plain partisanship during primaries, supporting concern that a heated primary might damage general election party unity. Subsequent postconvention findings suggest that the salience of candidate-focused identity fades, while homogeneity of one’s network regarding party support helps to make perceived hostility toward one’s party identity more salient. However, as campaigns become more candidate-centered, the contestation between nested candidate and party identities may grow fiercer.     

Need Public Policy Ignore the Third Sector? Government Policy in Australia and the United Kingdom

The policy of Australian governments, both Commonwealth, state and territory, toward those organisations that comprise a third sector of the organised economy is patchy and piecemeal. Absent is any recognition that they constitute a distinct sector; absent too is any recognition of their contribution to economy, society and politics. Such a situation is not inevitable. After identifying some of the gaps and contradictions in Australian policy toward the third sector, this article outlines the many policy initiatives to encourage the third sector or social economy (in European Union terms) taken by the Blair government in the United Kingdom. Given that there is a good deal of policy borrowing between Australia and the United Kingdom, the stark contrast between the two countries in this policy field is puzzling. This article concludes by identifying four developments that led to this policy explosion in the United Kingdom and finds them largely missing in Australia. This leads to a conclusion that a similar range of policies are unlikely to develop here.     

Judicial Behavior and Public Opinion: Popular Expectations Regarding the Factors That Influence Supreme Court Decisions

This article examines the mass public's perceptions of the factors that actually influence Supreme Court decisions as well those that ought to influence such decisions. We expect significant discrepancies between what the public believes ought to be the case and what it perceives to actually be the case with regard to Supreme Court decision making and that these discrepancies have a significant negative impact on the public's assessment of the Court. More specifically, we hypothesize that the public believes that political factors have more influence on the Court than ought to be the case and that the public perceives traditional legal factors to be less influential than they should be. We find that the expected discrepancies do exist and significantly detract from popular regard for the Court.     

Mitochondrial DNA sequencing of cat hair: an informative forensic tool

Approximately 81.7 million cats are in 37.5 million U.S. households. Shed fur can be criminal evidence because of transfer to victims, suspects, and/or their belongings. To improve cat hairs as forensic evidence, the mtDNA control region from single hairs, with and without root tags, was sequenced. A dataset of a 402-bp control region segment from 174 random-bred cats representing four U.S. geographic areas was generated to determine the informativeness of the mtDNA region. Thirty-two mtDNA mitotypes were observed ranging in frequencies from 0.6-27%. Four common types occurred in all populations. Low heteroplasmy, 1.7%, was determined. Unique mitotypes were found in 18 individuals, 10.3% of the population studied. The calculated discrimination power implied that 8.3 of 10 randomly selected individuals can be excluded by this region. The genetic characteristics of the region and the generated dataset support the use of this cat mtDNA region in forensic applications.     

Obliging children

Children may sometimes undergo healthcare procedures that are not intended to improve their health status. Such interventions might include the use of young children as bone marrow donors or their enrolment in non-therapeutic research. One of the justifications used to legitimise these interventions is the premise that children have obligations to others; to their family in the case of related bone marrow transplantation, and to wider society in the case of non-therapeutic research. However, this 'obligation model' (the notion that children possess positive obligations to advance the health status of others) fails as a justificatory paradigm because it is based upon a confusion, identified by Hart, between two notions; that of 'being under an obligation to do something' and that of 'being obliged to do something'. Instead the 'obligation model' is a device employed to put a justificatory gloss upon a consequentialist decision-making process; removing the legitimising gloss allows for a more transparent look at the conflict between parental rights and an individual child's right to bodily integrity.