first opinion
Are doctors' protests in India missing the point?
DIBYANGSHU SARKAR/AFP via Getty Images
Doctors across India have been protesting for weeks after one of their own was raped and murdered at a public hospital by somebody who was neither a patient nor staff. Protestors are demanding "justice for the victim" and a safer work environment. In West Bengal, where the murder occurred, junior doctors in public hospitals have been on strike for a month.
But in a First Opinion essay, historian Kiran Kumbhar — who formerly practiced medicine in India himself — argues that the protests are overlooking a key aspect of the horrible crime. It was less about medicine, and more about an ongoing epidemic of violence against women, he writes. Read more.
infectious disease
Half a million children in Gaza vaccinated against polio
Around 560,000 children under the age of 10 have received the first dose of an oral vaccine against polio during WHO's first emergency vaccination campaign in Gaza, the organization announced Friday. "The progress made in this first round is encouraging, but the job is far from done," Jean Gough, UNICEF Special Representative in the State of Palestine said in a press release. Experts began to fear that polio was spreading in the region in July after the virus was detected in wastewater samples.
The organization originally set out to vaccinate 640,000 children in the first two weeks of September — but it's hard to keep track of how many children are left in Gaza as the population continues to flee violence and innumerable lives are lost in attacks, WHO said. The organization hopes to initiate a campaign within a month to give children a second dose of the vaccine, and called for another humanitarian pause and "a long-lasting ceasefire."
first opinion
Is it possible to humanely make a mouse depressed?
There's an urgent need for new, more effective antidepressant medications. Before those drugs are tested in humans, they're often tested in mice — but how do scientists know which mice are depressed? In the "forced swim test," developed in 1977, a mouse is placed in a small tank filled with water. When the mouse stops fighting to escape and simply floats, unmoving, researchers label that as a depressive state. In the "tail suspension test," a mouse is dangled by its tail in a small chamber. Again, once it stops trying to escape, it is officially depressed.
These so-called depressed mice have been used to advance human medicine, but psychiatrist Karen S. Greenberg writes that these methods have had mixed results at best. In a First Opinion essay, Greenberg argues that such tests need to be retired in favor of more modern, non-animal-based approaches to testing. Read more.
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