A review of radiation doses and associated parameters in western australian mining operations (2018-20)

In the 2019-20 reporting period, nineteen mining operations in Western Australia were identified as having workers who were likely to be exposed to ionising radiation stemming from naturally occurring radioactive materials (NORMs), seventeen of which, known hereinafter as Reporting Entities (REs), were required to submit an annual report of the dose estimates of their workforce to the mining regulatory authority. In 2018 the International Commission for Radiological Protection published the revision of the Dose Coefficients (DCs) for occupational intakes of radionuclides of the uranium-238 and thorium-232 decay series, in ICRP-137 and ICRP-141. The 2019-20 annual reports are the first to apply the revised DCs to estimate worker doses. The mean effective dose (ED) reported by the 17 REs increased by 32.4% to 0.94 mSv in 2019-20 from 0.71 mSv reported in 2018-19, indicating that the mean ED is approaching the 1 mSv annual dose estimate at which regulatory intervention should be considered. The mean committed effective dose (CED) from inhalation of dusts containing long-lived alpha-emitting (LLα) nuclides has increased by 35% from 0.40 mSv in 2018-19 to 0.54 mSv in 2019-20. The maximum CED from LLα increased by 16.3% from 3.20 mSv in 2018-19 to 3.72 mSv in 2019-20. The authors consider that, in the absence of other explanations provided by the REs, the increase is largely attributable to the revised DC’s published in ICRP-137 and ICRP-141, but highlight that there are significant variations between REs that make a generalised conclusion problematic. The maximum reported ED in 2019-20 was 6.0 mSv, an increase of 36.4% from 2018-19 (4.4 mSv). The 2019-20 reporting period is the first time in a decade in which mine worker EDs have been elevated to the point that EDs have exceeded 5 mSv, a level at which personal monitoring and additional institutional controls are required.

Controlling Corruption

Institutional checks on corruption are central to virtually every reform strategy, but they do not come in any standard form, and are unlikely to succeed in isolation. Some are aimed primarily at bureaucratic corruption, some more at political corruption, and some of the most important operate in both realms. Anticorruption agencies (ACAs) have been established—sometimes repeatedly—in around a hundred societies but have an indifferent track record. They are most likely to succeed when supported by a range of other strong governing institutions. Transparency is also a common institutional reform, and it too has consequences that are varying and contingent on local and cross-border influences. Conflict of interest legislation, and whistleblower protections, are also important issues in numerous societies. Specific institutional controls, in the end, require sound supportive institutions of several sorts; even then, the political, economic, and social challenges of corruption control remain formidable.

Needlestick Injuries Among Healthcare Workers Administering COVID-19 Vaccinations in the United States

As mass COVID-19 vaccination programs roll out across the country, we are potentially faced with compromising workers’ health for the sake of the broader public health, as it relates to occupational exposure to contaminated needles and syringes. We have the opportunity to provide recommendations that advance protection of workers through the industrial hygiene hierarchy of controls, especially in light of the twentieth anniversary of the Needlestick Safety and Prevention Act. Specifically, greater focus on institutional controls that can dictate the safety culture and climate of institutions that roll out COVID-19 vaccination programs, while maintaining careful focus on preventing sharps injuries and blood exposure. In addition, we provide suggestions for the role that engineering controls, such as devices with sharps injury prevention features play in protecting workers from exposure to bloodborne pathogens, as well as the importance of ongoing injury incident surveillance.

Personalized medicine, digital technology and trust: a Kantian account

Trust relations in the health services have changed from asymmetrical paternalism to symmetrical autonomy-based participation, according to a common account. The promises of personalized medicine emphasizing empowerment of the individual through active participation in managing her health, disease and well-being, is characteristic of symmetrical trust. In the influential Kantian account of autonomy, active participation in management of own health is not only an opportunity, but an obligation. Personalized medicine is made possible by the digitalization of medicine with an ensuing increased tailoring of diagnostics, treatment and prevention to the individual. The ideal is to increase wellness by minimizing the layer of interpretation and translation between relevant health information and the patient or user. Arguably, this opens for a new level of autonomy through increased participation in treatment and prevention, and by that, increased empowerment of the individual. However, the empirical realities reveal a more complicated landscape disturbed by information ‘noise’ and involving a number of complementary areas of expertise and technologies, hiding the source and logic of data interpretation. This has lead to calls for a return to a mild form of paternalism, allowing expertise coaching of patients and even withholding information, with patients escaping responsibility through blind or lazy trust. This is morally unacceptable, according to Kant’s ideal of enlightenment, as we have a duty to take responsibility by trusting others reflexively, even as patients. Realizing the promises of personalized medicine requires a system of institutional controls of information and diagnostics, accessible for non-specialists, supported by medical expertise that can function as the accountable gate-keeper taking moral responsibility required for an active, reflexive trust.

A randomized trial of laryngeal organ preservation evaluating two cycles of induction chemotherapy with platinum, docetaxel, and a novel Bcl-xL inhibitor.

6066 Background: Laryngeal bio-selection with induction chemotherapy (platinum + 5-FU infusion: PF) has been demonstrated to result in impressive rates of survival and organ preservation with moderate toxicities. We sought to reduce the toxicity of PF by substituting docetaxel (T) for 5-FU and improve the tumor response rate with the addition of the Bcl-xL inhibitor AT-101. Methods: Pts with advanced stage laryngeal cancer were treated with 1 cycle of T 75 mg/m2 + platinum (P) (cisplatin 100 mg/m2 or carboplatin AUC 6) and were randomized 2:1 to the addition of AT-101. Patients with a CR proceeded to chemoradiation (CRT) with concurrent weekly P. All pts with PR or NR underwent a second cycle of induction with TP + AT-101. Pts with a > 50% response (CR or PR) after the second cycle of induction chemotherapy underwent CRT. Pts with a ≤ 50% response (NR) underwent laryngectomy. PET-CT was performed 12 weeks after CRT. Pts with residual disease underwent salvage laryngectomy (SL). Results: 54 eligible pts were enrolled; 46 M, 8 F; median age 59; 26 T4; stage III 16, stage IV 38; site: 2 hypopharyngeal, 39 supraglottic, 11 glottic, 2 subglottic. After cycle 1 of induction, 2/54 (4%) died prior to assessment by DL and 2 were removed from protocol due to adverse events (AEs). 29/50 pts (58%) had ≥ 50% response, 3 of which had CR; 2 proceeded to CRT & 1 received a 2nd cycle of IC. 21/50 pts (42%) had < 50% response. A total of 48 pts received cycle 2 of IC. After the 2nd cycle, a total of 39/50 pts (78%) had ≥ 50% response & received CRT. No difference in response was seen with addition of AT-101. 11/50 pts (22%) had < 50% response- 8 had laryngectomy & 3 refused. Following CRT, 10 pts underwent SL, 2 for residual disease & 8 late SL. The organ preservation rate was 31/50 (62%). The most common grade 3/4 toxicities associated with IC were nausea 9%, neutropenia 9%, & infection 7%. 1 pt died of CNS hemorrhage unrelated to therapy & 1 from sepsis. The median follow-up time is 28 months. The 2 yr laryngectomy-free survival is 54% (95% CI:38-68) & 2 yr overall survival is 81% (95% CI: 64-90). Conclusions: AT-101 did not improve responses to P. Treatment with 2 cycles of IC with PT produced similar response rates to our institutional controls, but organ preservation was somewhat less following treatment with weekly P + RT. Toxicities were overall improved with this treatment strategy. Clinical trial information: NCT01633541.

Durkheim's Theory of Anomie and the 2016 American Election

Anomie is a listless, affectless and alienated condition where one feels entirely cut off from others, it was coined by the sociologist Émile Durkheim in the year 1897 to explain the social integration and the rising suicide rates in European countries. The same interpretation is used to justify the rise of Donald Trump taking into consideration the anomie in the American society. This study seeks to explain how the American society has been evolved or been changed amid the anomic conditions which have attached themselves to this nation and how anomie gotten entrenched in the American Society to the point that it has caused profound impacts on several areas of life like firearm and property legislation and social welfare. For instance, it explains how the anomic conditions of the American Society enabled President Donald Trump to get into office and how this occurrence greatly surprised many individuals in the country. The paper also describes how the American society exists in a permanent anomie state where competitive individualism, as well as social institutions, tends to lead a lot of Americans to resist institutional controls actively and demonstrates how the rates of suicide vastly increased after the election of President Trump, who many did not ever believe or expect him to be elected into the seat.

Labor Politics in the Neoliberal Global Economy

Labor in the global neoliberal economy is configured by overlapping networks of power in a manner that sustains imperial patterns between nations and the profitability of transnational corporations (TNCs) in many ways. New forms of institutional controls enabled by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund usher in new categories of workers—part-time, temporary, flexible—and precarious forms of work. The advancement of technology is increasingly interdependent on the exploitation of labor. This article critically explores the implications of neoliberalism in transnational labor involving women employees and the employees in the offshoring industry in general in the global South—the two workforce categories boosting profits for TNCs but remaining invisible for the most part and suffering precarity while driving global capitalism.

On recent advances in human engineering

Advances in embryology, genetics, and regenerative medicine regularly attract attention from scientists, scholars, journalists, and policymakers, yet implications of these advances may be broader than commonly supposed. Laboratories culturing human embryos, editing human genes, and creating human-animal chimeras have been working along lines that are now becoming intertwined. Embryogenic methods are weaving traditional in vivo and in vitro distinctions into a new “in vivitro” (in life in glass) fabric. These and other methods known to be in use or thought to be in development promise soon to bring society to startling choices and discomfiting predicaments, all in a global effort to supply reliably rejuvenating stem cells, to grow immunologically nonprovocative replacement organs, and to prevent, treat, cure, or even someday eradicate diseases having genetic or epigenetic mechanisms. With humanity’s human-engineering era now begun, procedural prohibitions, funding restrictions, institutional controls, and transparency rules are proving ineffective, and business incentives are migrating into the most basic life-sciences inquiries, wherein lie huge biomedical potentials and bioethical risks. Rights, health, and heritage are coming into play with bioethical presumptions and formal protections urgently needing reassessment.

Regulatory Freedom and Control in the New ASEAN Regional Investment Treaties

The expanding universe of regional investment agreements of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) illustrates the difficulties of accepting host States’ expansive regulatory freedoms, while neglecting to design durable institutional controls for regionally-coordinated investment treaty compliance and regionally-harmonized investment treaty interpretation. Since its transformation from a loose economic cooperation into a rules-based organization discharging binding executive-legislative functions under its 2008 Charter, ASEAN has already entered into regional investment treaties applicable within the ten ASEAN Member States (2009), as well as with China (2010), India (2014), Australia and New Zealand (2009), Korea (2009), and Japan (2008). Negotiations are pending with the United States, the European Union, and Canada. Institutional deficits in the monitoring and implementation of ASEAN regional investment treaties could be addressed by strengthening the mandate and capacity of the ASEAN Investment Area (AIA) Council. An intergovernmental centralized appellate mechanism could help facilitate harmonized interpretation of these regional treaties.