Groningen Centre for Health Law

With millions of children dying each year of malnutrition, breastfeeding holds the potential to save more lives than any public health intervention on infant mortality. This unique practice, achievable at an incomparably minimal cost, has also proven to have positive health effects on lactating mothers, protecting them from, inter alia, osteoporosis and breast and ovarian cancer.

Voices in the Field: Professors Asbjorn Eide and Wenche Barth Eide

On the 28 – 29 of September 2017, Prof. Brigit Toebes, Dr. Marie Elske Gispen and Yi Zhang participated in the 6th annual conference of the European Association of Health Law (‘EAHL’). The conference was organized by the Faculty of Law, University of Bergen, Norway in cooperation with the EAHL. The theme of the conference was health rights regulations and the distribution of healthcare in Europe.

Culture and health are to some degree mutually constitutive. The cultural frameworks into which we are socialised often shape our views on sickness, wellbeing, the causes of illnesses, and their remedies. The UN Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights acknowledges this and, therefore, requires all health goods, facilities, and services to be “culturally appropriate”. This is an obligation on all States parties to the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights to progressively realise. Culturally sensitive approaches to healthcare are important at all times, but can be especially vital during an epidemic. Our study of the recent Ebola crisis that reached a peak in West Africa in 2015 exemplified how indispensable culturally sensitive approaches to the right to health can be.

reland seems to be the stage of some of the most bizarre pharmaceutical company behaviour these days. This month, the pharmaceutical company CSL Behring announced it will no longer provide Respreeza (human alpha1-proteinase inhibitor), a treatment for hereditary emphysema, for free. Most of the patients that depend on the programme had volunteered to be part of the clinical trials to test the product, which was necessary to obtain a marketing authorisation for the product.

In order to further promote the level of global health governance and encourage research in global health law, the 2017 International Symposium on Global Health Law was held in Guilin city, China from July 2nd to July 3rd, 2017. The organizer of the symposium was Central South University, China. The symposium was hosted jointly by the Institute of Medical and Health Law of Central South University, the O’Neill Institute for National & Global Health Law of Georgetown University, and the Global Health Law Research Centre of the University of Groningen (GHLG).

Sex-selective abortions raise moral, legal, and social issues, reinforcing discrimination and sexist stereotypes towards women by devaluing females.[i] In countries like Armenia, where the underlying reason for sex-selective abortions is the widespread son preference, it implies the concept of valuing women only if they are able to produce sons. To tackle son preference in the country and normalize the sex-ratio, in 2016 the Government introduced a legal ban on sex-selective abortions. Whereas the harms of sex-selective abortions are severe, the question is whether such restriction is the most effective and acceptable tool in preventing the practice of sex-selective abortions from occurring and what the implications of such restriction are.

This year the World Health Organization (WHO) added dolutegravir, an antiretroviral medicine for the treatment of HIV infection, to its Model List of Essential Medicines in response to the recent evidence showing the medicine’s safety, efficacy, and high barrier to resistance. A recent study HIV drug resistance report 2017 launched by the WHO at the IAS2017 shows that in 6 of the 11 countries surveyed in Africa, Asia and Latin America, over 10% of people starting antiretroviral therapy had a strain of HIV that was resistant to some of the most widely used HIV medicines. This is a worrying trend and such levels of resistance demand a review of the treatment practices including switching to more robust ARV regimen.