How long can we wait?

According to the National Family Health Survey conducted in India in 1992-93, there are approximately 60 million children under age 5 years old living in India in varying stages of malnutrition. The prevalence of malnutrition was 15.6% at age 6 months, rising to 63.4% at age 24 months. Child health and growth status are attributed to the failure of the mother to add, after age 6 months, enough supplementary food to breast milk to meet the infant's nutritional requirement. The residents of Punjab villages are either poor, largely illiterate, landless laborers without a milk-producing animal, or relatively wealthier, more literate owners of at least one milk-producing animal. The question therefore begs whether poor mothers fail to supplement their infants' diets or are unable to do so given the limits of their available resources. The problem must be addressed both locally and nationally. Those who are relatively poor must be taught to exclusively breast feed until the end of the sixth or even seventh month. The mother could then begin to supplement her breastmilk with small amounts of whatever is cooked in the household as often as she breast feeds. Community outreach could also be undertaken to spread the message.     

How can we begin to measure recovery?

Background  

There is a lack of consensus in the addiction treatment literature regarding the definition of substance abuse "recovery".     

Retreat from Nuremberg: can we prevent unethical medical research?

The prosecution of doctors guilty of appalling human rights abuses at Nuremberg was achieved on the mistaken premise that the research community already had a code of conduct which, if applied, would have made such abuses impossible. In fact, not only was there no such code but when the 'Nuremberg Code' was published after the trial it continued to be ignored by many doctors for some thirty years afterwards. Indeed its central principle of informed consent has itself been eroded by subsequent international agreements on the ethics of medical research. This review shows that the mechanisms for approval of medical research which have now been promulgated in England and Wales, in practice, are applied on a very variable basis. Research in vulnerable groups unable to give fully informed consent such as children, prisoners and the incompetent elderly require the application of more rigorous standards of ethical control than those currently in operation. The use of vulnerable populations in the developing world and the application of international standards to them is also considered. A number of suggestions for improvements in current procedures in all these areas are put forward. The proposals for the United Kingdom would meet the requirements of the European Convention on bioethical research and the recent government consultation paper on medical treatment and research in incompetent adults.