Continuing the conversation about public health ethics: education for public health professionals in Europe

An important related question is why we should teach public health ethics. Fundamentally, we must teach public health ethics because ethical practice creates and maintains public trust and public health cannot function without public trust. To serve the public—whether through controlling an outbreak of an infectious disease, preparing for or responding to public health emergencies, or reducing the impact of non-communicable diseases—communities and individuals must trust our decisions and actions. This trust grows in large part from past successes, transparent and participatory decision making, and ethical management of the inevitable moral tensions that arise in our work.S

Protecting vulnerable research participants: A Foucault-inspired analysis of ethics committees

History has demonstrated the necessity of protecting research participants. Research ethics are based on a concept of asymmetry of power, viewing the researcher as powerful and potentially dangerous and establishing ethics committees as external agencies in the field of research. We argue in favour of expanding this perspective on relationships of power to encompass the ethics committees as one among several actors that exert power and that act in a relational interplay with researchers and participants. We employ Michel Foucault's ideas of power as an omnipresent force which is dynamic and unstable, as well as the notion that knowledge and power are inextricably intertwined. The article discusses how research ethics committees may affect academic freedom. In addition it is pointed out that research participants could be harmed - not only by unfortunate research practices, but also by being subjected to the protective efforts of ethics monitoring bodies

Bone morphology allows estimation of loading history in a murine model of bone adaptation

Bone adapts its morphology (density/microarchitecture) in response to the local loading conditions in such away that a uniform tissue loading is achieved (‘Wolff’s law’). This paradigm has been used as a basis for bone remodeling simulations to predict the formation and adaptation of trabecular bone. However, in order to predict bone architectural changes in patients, the physiological external loading conditions, to which the bone was adapted, need to be determined. In the present study, we developed a novel bone loading estimation method to predict such external loading conditions by calculating the loading history that produces the most uniform bone tissue loading.We applied this method to murine caudal vertebrae of two groups that were in vivo loaded by either 0 or 8 N, respectively. Plausible load cases were sequentially applied to micro-finite element models of the mice vertebrae, and scaling factors were calculated for each load case to derive the most uniform tissue strainenergy density when all scaled load cases are applied simultaneously. The bone loading estimation method was able to predict the difference in loading history of the two groups and the correct load magnitude for the loaded group. This result suggests that the bone loading history can be estimated from its morphology and that such a method could be useful for predicting the loading history for bone remodeling studies or at sites where measurements are difficult, as in bone in vivo or fossil bones