Search
The Netherlands: euthanasia down by 7% in 2018. A real decrease?
The 2018 official euthanasia figures in the Netherlands are down by 7% for the first time since 2003. Given the size of the elderly population, this is an astonishing trend. Until the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport publishes its report, several...
Japan: victims of forced sterilization will receive compensation
Under the new law passed today, the thousands of surviving victims of Japan's forced sterilization program from 1948 to 1996 will each receive 3.2 million yen ($28,700). About twenty victims have challenged this amount in court, considering it to be...
Woman miraculously wakes up after 27 years in a coma
“ The reason I shared her story is to tell people not to lose hope on their loved ones. Do not consider them dead when they are in such a state”. Munira Abdulla, a woman from the United Arab Emirates (UAE), miraculously recovered from the coma she had been in for...
New Zealand: “If the bill on end-of-life ‘choices’ had been passed four years ago, I would be dead”
Quadriplegic since the age of 17, a young woman explains: "for most of my life, I have been for assisted suicide." But during the debates on a bill to legalize this practice in New Zealand, she denounces a society that offers no other choices to the “most...
Four 3-parent IVF clinics pending in the US: scientists push for approval
Researchers at Columbia University in New York say they “have created embryos” for four patients and are ready to implant them. However, “they face a legal impasse”. The law prohibits the FDA from examining “any application for human research involving a human...
Japan: a positive first global clinical trial with iPS
In Japan, the five patients with age-related macular degeneration, who received the first induced pluripotent stem cell (iPS) transplant in March 2017, "have all endured the surgery well". The announcement was made last Friday by the team of researchers from the Riken...
Women in their forties exploited by the UK’s reproductive business
Older women in the United Kingdom are reportedly being exploited by in-vitro fertilization (IVF) clinics "trading on hope". These conclusions by the fertility observatory at the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) warn against certain private clinics,...
Towards self-powered pacemakers implanted for life?
A new pacemaker model described in the journal Nature Communications has been successfully tested in pigs. The specific feature of this pacemaker is that it draws its energy from the heartbeat: it would therefore be implanted "for life" according to the researchers,...
Vincent Lambert: cessation of care validated by the French Council of State
The French Council of State today decided to validate the medical decision to "terminate the treatment" of Vincent Lambert, who has been in a vegetative state for the past ten years; the decision goes against his parents’ wishes. This marks the "permanent end"...
3D printing of human organs: a step forward
A German team working on 3D bioprinting of human organs has developed a technique to obtain a "detailed blueprint" of organs to accurately reproduce their structure. Led by Ali Erturk in Munich, the researchers used a solvent to make the organs transparent. As...
Transforming brain signals into words to give back a voice to people who have lost it
People who have lost the ability to speak due to a stroke, cerebral palsy, Charcot's disease, Alzheimer's, brain damage, cancer, etc. may soon regain their voice. Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) announced on Wednesday that they have...
Autonomous robotic catheter navigation in pig hearts
Bioengineers at Boston's Children's Hospital have developed a catheter "capable of autonomous navigation in the body," which has been tested in pigs. Able to steer using an optical touch sensor with artificial intelligence [1] it was developed to "make surgery as safe...