Asian Bioethics Review最新文献

The COVID-19 pandemic, which spread around the world in 2020, changed the lives of millions of people and affected the life and functioning of all countries and people without exception. With the emergence of the opportunity to be vaccinated against COVID-19, the problem of making a decision about vaccination also appeared. But it has become increasingly clear that the coronavirus is moving into the group of annual viral epidemic diseases that occur every year in different countries during the seasonal wave of acute respiratory viral infections. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic against the background of the adoption of serious quarantine measures indicates the need for large-scale vaccination of the population as the most effective way to protect against COVID-19. In this article, we pay special attention to vaccination, as the main factor in ensuring health, reducing the morbidity and severity of the course of the COVID-19 disease, and an important task of the state and modern public administration.

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Journals have been described as “duty bearers” of upholding fundamental ethical principles that are essential for maintaining the ethical integrity of newly generated and disseminated knowledge. To play our part, we evaluated diversity and inclusion in the leadership and management of global and international health journals. We developed Journal Diversity Index (JDI) to measure three parameters of diversity and representation (gender, geographic, socioeconomic status). Relevant information regarding editorial board members of systematically screened journals was sequentially extracted and job titles were categorized into five editorial roles. Chi-squared test was utilized to study associations between gender and geographic distribution of editors along with the Medline indexing of the journal and its impact factor. Out of 43 journals included, 62.7% were published from two high-income countries. Women comprised 44% of the total editors. Among all the editorial board members, we did not find any information suggesting the representation of non-binary and transgender individuals. Furthermore, 68.2% of editors were based in high-income countries with 67.3% of the editors belonging to the Global North. This disparity in geographic region and socioeconomic level was observed across all five editorial roles. Among all women editors, more than 70% worked in non-Medline and non-impact factor journals. Only two journals scored “excellent” on JDI. Despite the continuous evolution of the definition of global health ethics, marginalized individuals, and their perspectives remain underrepresented in this field. Thus, we call for swift action regarding the decentralization and redistribution of global and international health journal editorial boards.

While animal sentience research has flourished in the last decade, scepticism about our ability to accurately measure animal feelings has unfortunately remained fairly common. Here, we argue that evolutionary considerations about the functions of feelings will give us more reason for optimism and outline a method for how this might be achieved.

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This study aims to develop guidelines of key concepts and specific considerations to make the research more ethical when conducting neurological examinations and treatment interventions in mentally ill patients. We analyzed guideline development theory and literature, previous issues, and discussions with specialists of philosophy, medicine, sociology, and bioethics. The selection of research participants, drafting of intervention plans, and informed consent process were examined with reference to the dual burden; the minimal risk as a general rule of ethical allowance levels, assent and dissent to assess the individual’s judgment capacity for consent, relational autonomy for personal consent with assistance by the proxy, and risk/benefit assessments. When conducting studies, this guideline requires that these three processes be set up appropriately on a case-by-case basis.

Evidence suggests a limited contribution to the total research output in leading obstetrics and gynaecology journals by researchers from the developing world. Editorial bias, quality of scientific research produced and language barriers have been attributed as possible causes for this phenomenon. The aim of this study was to understand the prevalence of editorial board members based out of low and lower-middle income countries in leading journals in the field of obstetrics and gynaecology. The top 21 journals in the field of obstetrics and gynaecology were selected based on their impact factor, SCImago ranking and literature search. The composition of the editorial boards of these journals was studied based on World Bank Income Criteria to understand the representation status of researchers from low and lower-middle income countries. A total of 1315 board members make up the editorial composition of leading obstetrics and gynaecology journals. The majority of these editors belong to high-income countries (n = 1148; 87.3%). Low (n = 6; 0.45%) and lower-middle income (n = 55; 4.18%) countries make up for a very minuscule proportion of editorial board members. Only a meagre 9 out of 21 journals have editorial board members from these countries (42.85%). Low and low-middle countries have poor representation in the editorial boards of leading obstetrics and gynaecology journals. Poor representation in research from these countries has grave consequences for a large proportion of the global population and multidisciplinary collaborative efforts must be taken to rapidly change this statistic with immediate effect.