Asian Bioethics Review最新文献

Within cross-border surrogacy, particularly in consumer countries, the protection of children’s human rights presents complex and significant challenges. This study examines how Australian surrogacy facilitators perceive and navigate the rights of children born through such arrangements. Despite striving to adopt child-centred practices, facilitators face structural barriers, including conflicting interests between intended parents and children, the commodification of children in surrogacy contracts, and legal ambiguities around parental relationships. These challenges create a persistent tension between the universal recognition of children as independent rights holders and the practical demands of facilitating surrogacy arrangements. The findings highlight the need for robust regulatory frameworks and clearer accountability mechanisms to ensure children’s rights are upheld. This study advances the scholarship on surrogacy and human rights and informs the ongoing review of Australian surrogacy laws, emphasizing the need for stronger protections for children in international surrogacy arrangements.

This paper examines the ethical justification for wider patient access to their own medical records, focusing on utilitarian and deontological perspectives. At present, despite acknowledging that patients have rights to their medical records in Malaysia, this access is restricted. The utilitarian approach, rooted in consequentialist theory, advocates for actions that produce the greatest benefit for most people. It emphasises that patient access to medical records can enhance patient empowerment, engagement and overall health outcomes. Despite concerns from healthcare providers about potential patient confusion and misinterpretation, empirical studies indicate that patients generally benefit from access, feeling more in control and involved in their healthcare decisions. Conversely, Kant’s deontological theory prioritises the morality of actions based on their inherent nature rather than outcomes. It supports unrestricted patient access as a moral obligation, emphasising respect for patient autonomy and truth-telling. According to this theory, withholding information from competent patients is ethically unjustifiable and infringes on their rights. Both ethical frameworks reveal significant patient benefits and challenge the traditional paternalistic approach of healthcare providers. This paper concludes that wider patient access to medical records in Malaysia is ethically justifiable and beneficial, urging legal and ethical reforms to support this practice.

This survey analyzes the knowledge and perceptions of members and staff of ethics committee and investigators toward conflicts of interest in clinical research. This cross-sectional survey in China included 324 respondents from November to December 2022. The 12-item questionnaire estimated the knowledge of respondents on conflicts of interest and correct answers were given by at least 47%. According to perception scores, most respondents (88%) believed that strengthening conflicts of interest management was necessary, such as through national government, institutional regulation, ethics training, avoidance systems, timely reporting, the declaration and management of nonfinancial conflicts of interest, and the assessment of relevant conflicts of interest for the chief reviewer. However, less believed it was necessary to establish a conflicts of interest committee in institutions (74.1%), to enroll more members from other institutions (61.4%), and to avoid appointing a scientific research department leader as the chairperson of ethics committee (72.5%). Technical title and ethics training both significantly affected median knowledge scores (P < 0.05). Further, technical title and ethics training also had an obvious influence on the average perception score (P < 0.05). These findings are critical for enhancing conflicts of interest management in clinical research in China.

Social listening has emerged as a powerful tool for bridging the gap between public health messaging and the diverse needs of communities. Its focus, however, has primarily centered on monitoring social media platforms for public health communication and managing infodemics, thereby neglecting a considerable segment of the population, especially in low- and middle-income countries, with no internet access. Within low- and middle-income countries, established social and cultural norms and financial constraints contribute to gender disparities in both access and social acceptance of educational attainment and mobile phone use by women. Our research explores the influence of gender and socio-economic status on engagement with social media and its use as an information source. We use two case studies involving urban and rural settings in India. In the first case study, the surveyed sample in the urban setting comprised 1565 men and 1133 women employed in the call center industry across five cities in India. In the second case study, a total of 723 men and 748 women were surveyed in the rural Karnataka region in India. Our key findings indicate that women tend to use social media platforms less frequently than men for accessing news, and their economic status and caste shape their reliance on social media for essential health information. These findings underscore the necessity to integrate both online and offline data sources in social listening and health communication efforts, in order to mitigate the digital divide within communities.

On 20 May 2025, the 78^th World Health Assembly adopted the World Health Organization’s Pandemic Agreement (PA). With the benefit of lessons learnt from the COVID-19 pandemic, the PA rightly focuses on advancing equity, but we are concerned that the PA appears to apply equity narrowly as distributive justice and neglects epistemic justice. Using infodemics and antimicrobial resistance (AMR) as examples, we argue that the PA misses epistemic architectures. We first explain why infodemics are an important public health concern that the PA seeks to address, even though it does not clearly mention them. We then explain why equity must be interpreted to include epistemic justice. Using infodemics as an example, we subsequently discuss how the epistemic architecture of the PA on infodemics will need to be set out clearly as an annex to the PA or through the adoption of an additional protocol. We note in particular that the PA could help to draw together different normative and human rights approaches and frameworks to meet the requirements of epistemic justice. A similar challenge applies to AMR as an epistemically complex phenomenon, and our argument is that a global response to AMR will require a just and equitable epistemic architecture that the PA could lay the foundation for.