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"Environmental risk assessment Moral and ethical aspects."
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The ethics of precaution : uncertain environmental health threats and duties of due care
\"There are thousands of substances manufactured in the U.S., to which the public is routinely exposed and for which toxicity data is limited or absent. Some insist that uncertainty about the severity of potential harm justifies implementing precautionary regulations, while others claim that uncertainty justifies the absence of regulations until sufficient evidence confirms a strong probability of severe harm. In this book, Levente Szentkirâalyi overcomes this impasse in his defense of precautionary environmental risk regulation by shifting the focus from how to manage uncertainty to what it is we owe each other morally. He argues that actions that create uncertain threats wrongfully gamble with the welfare of those who are exposed, and neglect the reciprocity that our equal moral standing demands. If we take the moral equality and rights of others seriously, we have a duty to exercise due care to strive to prevent putting them in possible harm's way. The Ethics of Precaution will be of great interest to researchers, educators, advanced students, and practitioners working in the fields of environmental political theory, ethics of risk, and environmental policy\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Transhumanist dreams and dystopian nightmares : the promise and peril of genetic engineering
What will happen when technology allows us to direct our own evolution?
Transhumanists advocate for the development and distribution of technologies that will enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities, even eliminate aging. What if the dystopian futures and transhumanist utopias found in the pages of science journals, Margaret Atwood novels, films like Gattaca, and television shows like Dark Angel are realized? What kind of world would humans have created?
Maxwell J. Mehlman considers the promises and perils of using genetic engineering in an effort to direct the future course of human evolution. He addresses scientific and ethical issues without choosing sides in the dispute between transhumanists and their challengers. However, Transhumanist Dreams and Dystopian Nightmares reveals that radical forms of genetic engineering could become a reality much sooner than many people think, and that we need to encourage risk-management efforts.
Whether scientists are dubious or optimistic about the prospects for directed evolution, they tend to agree on two things. First, however long it takes to perfect the necessary technology, it is inevitable that humans will attempt to control their evolutionary future, and second, in the process of learning how to direct evolution, we are bound to make mistakes. Our responsibility is to learn how to balance innovation with caution.
eBook
Environmental Health Ethics
Environmental Health Ethics illuminates the conflicts between protecting the environment and promoting human health. In this study, David B. Resnik develops a method for making ethical decisions on environmental health issues. He applies this method to various issues, including pesticide use, antibiotic resistance, nutrition policy, vegetarianism, urban development, occupational safety, disaster preparedness and global climate change. Resnik provides readers with the scientific and technical background necessary to understand these issues. He explains that environmental health controversies cannot simply be reduced to humanity versus environment and explores the ways in which human values and concerns - health, economic development, rights and justice - interact with environmental protection.
eBook
The ethics of environmentally responsible health care
As the state of the natural world declines, environmentally related health problems will increasingly shape the landscape of human health and disease. The confluence of several global trends - rapid population growth combined with an even more dramatic increase in natural resource consumption - drives ecological deterioration, and this in turn poses serious challenges to health. U.S. medicine and bioethics have too long ignored the relevance of these global trends to health care. This ground breaking work is a call to attention. It brings bioethics and health care squarely into the 21st century. The book shows how environmental decline relates to human health and to health care practices in the U.S. and other industrialized countries. It outlines the environmental trends that will strongly affect health, and challenges us to see the connections between ways of practicing medicine and the very envrionmental problems that damage ecosystems and make people sick. In addition to philosophical analysis of the converging values of bioethics and environmental ethics, the book offers case studies as well as a number of practical suggestions for moving health care toward sustainability. The exploration of a hypothetical Green Health Center, in particular, offers an intellectual and moral framework for talking about environmental values in health care. Engaging and challenging, this book will appeal not only to health professionals and philosophers, but to anyone concerned about how to preserve and promote both human health and the health of the natural world.
eBook
Exercise at an onsite facility with or without direct exercise supervision improves health-related physical fitness and exercise participation: An 8-week randomised controlled trial with 15-month follow-up
Issue addressed: Physical activity and exercise participation is limited by a perceived lack of time, poor access to facilities and low motivation. The aim was to assess whether providing an exercise program to be completed at the workplace with or without direct supervision was effective for promoting health-related physical fitness and exercise participation.
Methods: Fifty university employees aged (Mean +-SD) 42.5 +- 11.1 years were prescribed a moderate- to vigorous-intensity aerobic and resistance exercise program to be completed at an onsite facility for 8 weeks. Participants were randomly allocated to receive direct exercise supervision or not. Cardiorespiratory fitness (VO2max) and maximal muscular strength were assessed at baseline and 8 weeks. Self-report physical activity was assessed at baseline, 8 weeks and 15 months postintervention.
Results: Attendance or exercise session volume were not different between groups. Cardiorespiratory fitness (Mean +-95% CI); +1.9 +- 0.7 mL kg min 1; P < .001), relative knee flexion (+7.4 +- 3.5 Nm.kg-1%; P < .001) and extension (+7.4 +- 4.6 Nm kg 1%; P < .01) strength increased, irrespective of intervention group. Self reported vigorous-intensity physical activity increased over the intervention (mean +- 95% CI; +450 +- 222 MET minutes per week; P < .001), but did not remain elevated at 15 months (+192 +- 276 MET minutes per week).
Conclusion: Providing a workplace exercise facility to complete an individually-prescribed 8-week exercise program is sufficient to improve health-related physical fitness in the short-term independent to the level of supervision provided, but does not influence long-term participation.
So what? Lower cost onsite exercise facility supervision is as effective at improving physical health and fitness as directly supervised exercise, however ongoing support may be required for sustained physical activity behaviour change.
Journal Article
Globalisation and Ecological Integrity in Science and International Law
This volume returns to one of the major themes of the Global Ecological Integrity Group: the interface between integrity as a scientific concept and a number of important issues in ethics, international law and public health. The main scholars who have worked on these topics over the years return to re-examine these dimensions from the viewpoint of global governance.
eBook
Health promotion: An ethical analysis
Thinking and practising ethically requires reasoning systematically about the right thing to do. Health promotion ethics - a form of applied ethics - includes analysis of health promotion practice and how this can be ethically justified. Existing frameworks can assist in such evaluation. These acknowledge the moral value of delivering benefits. But benefits need to be weighed against burdens, harms or wrongs, and these should be minimised: they include invading privacy, breaking confidentiality, restraining liberty, undermining self-determination or people's own values, or perpetuating injustice. Thinking about the ethics of health promotion also means recognising health promotion as a normative ideal: a vision of the good society. This ideal society values health, sees citizens as active and includes them in decisions that affect them, and makes the state responsible for providing all of its citizens, no matter how advantaged or disadvantaged, with the conditions and resources they need to be healthy. Ethicists writing about health promotion have focused on this relationship between the citizen and the state. Comparing existing frameworks, theories and the expressed values of practitioners themselves, we can see common patterns. All oppose pursuing an instrumental, individualistic, health-at-all-costs vision of health promotion. And all defend the moral significance of just processes: those that engage with citizens in a transparent, inclusive and open way. In recent years, some Australian governments have sought to delegitimise health promotion, defining it as extraneous to the role of the state.Good evidence is not enough to counter this trend, because it is founded in competing visions of a good society. For this reason, the most pressing agenda for health promotion ethics is to engage with communities, in a procedurally just way, about the role and responsibilities of the citizen and the state in promoting and maintaining good health.
Journal Article
What is safe? : the risks of living in a nuclear age
Is it safe? \"What are the risks involved?\" are questions frequently asked by members of the public. This unique book explains the fundamental problems faced in modern-day life. Terms such as \"risk\" and \"safe\" are clearly defined, and the risks encountered between birth and death are discussed, including transport, the home, healthcare, diet, and the workplace. The perception of risk, and the risks from radiation (natural, radwaste and nuclear reactors) are covered, along with management of risk and the psychology of risk perception. What is Safe? The Risks of Living in a Nuclear Age is illustrated with examples from the most deeply researched areas. Written for the lay-person, the volume also includes a complete reprint of the late Lord Walter Marshall's famous lecture \"The Radioactive Garden\". It will be of interest to students, teachers, researchers, industrialists or indeed anyone wishing for an up-to-date view of risk and safety.
eBook
Give Genetic Engineering Some Breathing Room
The regulation of recombinant DNA technology has been less than a stunning success. Most of the federal agencies involved have ignored the consensus of the scientific community that the new molecular techniques for genetic modification are extensions, or refinements, of earlier, more primitive ones, and policymakers and agencies have crafted sui generis, or particular, regulatory mechanisms that have prevented the field from reaching anything approaching its potential. The regulatory burden on the use of recombinant DNA technology is disproportionate to its risk, and the opportunity costs of regulatory delays and expenses are formidable. The public and private sectors have squandered billions of dollars on complying with superfluous, redundant regulatory requirements that have priced public sector and small company research and development out of the marketplace. These inflated development costs are the primary reason that more than 99% of genetically engineered crops that are being cultivated are large-scale commodity crops-corn, cotton, canola, soy, alfalfa and sugar beets.
Journal Article