Fall 2010 Issue

Joseph Curtatone is currently serving his fourth-term as mayor of Somerville, MA. During his tenure, Somerville has become nationally-renowned for its Shape Up Somerville program, an initiative aimed at reducing the prevalence of obesity within the city. In addition, Mayor Curtatone’s leadership in Somerville earned him the (now former) presidency of the Massachusetts Mayor’s Association, and has won praise from the Boston Globe Magazine which claimed Somerville to be “the best-run city in Massachusetts.”

At present, the large majority of parents in the United States who use gamete do not tell their children that they were conceived through gamete donation. Competing interests and different views of what is in the child’s best interest complicate the situation. While parents attempt to protect family cohesiveness, they risk psychologically harming their child, depriving her of important medical information, and infringing on her right to know her genetic origins. In this paper, I explore the arguments for and against disclosing information about the gamete donation to the child. I then conclude that parents have an obligation to tell the child about the gamete donation; however, they do not have an obligation to reveal identifying information about the donor. It may be suitable to institute a law allowing donor gamete children to gain access to non-identifying information about the gamete donor when they turn 18.

There is a global shortage of health care professionals, especially nurses, and low staffing levels directly correlates to poor quality of patient care. The Republic of Georgia, a former Soviet state, is a politically, economically, and socially developing country with a transitioning and reforming health care system that has been hindered by low nurse staffing levels. This overview describes the development of a national, electronic and web-based nursing registration database system that will analyze the specific need for nurses by determining the number, education, and specialty of nurses now practicing in the country, and the settings in which they work. The results of this database will facilitate the development of education courses to meet specific clinical needs, help to fully utilize nursing resources, and ultimately increase the quality of clinical practice, health care delivery, and national health status in Georgia.

The lack of “global justice” in the distribution of the world’s enormous economic and public health resources has led bioethicists to examine the ethics of the relationship between resource-rich and resource-poor countries. Although virtually all of the world’s poorest countries are indeed benefiting from globalization on an absolute scale, the unfairness lies in the relative distribution of this immense wealth of resources. Taking into consideration the tradeoffs presented by four basic ethical perspectives and the role of social determinants of health on the ethics of resource allocation, the author argues that public health resources should be allocated primarily to improving existing health care systems while limiting funding for basic science research. A case study analysis of malaria treatment campaigns illustrates the benefits of focusing on improving access to existing technologies instead of investing in future public health-related technologies.