Humanitarian Grounds Research Articles

Elimination of the Exculpatory Insanity Rule: A Modern Societal Need

The author argues that on rational, humanitarian, professional, societal, and constitutional grounds, the insanity defense as currently employed in the United States should be abolished. This comprehensive article discusses the constitutionality of abolition, alternatives to the insanity defense, and much more.

Trade unionism in Brazil

The operations of multinational companies in the developing world are coming under closer scrutiny from the international trade union movement. There are a variety of motives behind this interest. First, union-organised workers in the traditional manufacturing economies feel threatened by the 'world strategies' of the multinationals, especially in the motor industry, and argue that they should have rights of access and consultation before major overseas investment decisions are taken. Second, trade unionists have learned that multinational companies may be useful vehicles for aiding workers in other countries whose rights under the law are very restricted. Pressure on the parent company may result in concessions by subsidiaries to their employees which would not otherwise have been made: the treatment of black workers in apartheid South Africa is the most obvious example. Behind these two observations lies perhaps a more profound calculation. This is that the advancement of independent trade unionism in countries where it does not exist, while it can be justified on humanitarian or ideological grounds, may serve to equalise relative wage costs and thus promote fair as well as free trade. Recent developments on the trade union front in Brazil, a country in whose economy there is very substantial foreign participation, have thrown up some important lessons for labour organisations committed to developing 'international trade union solidarity' and for potential investors as well.

Rimactan parenteral formulation in clinical use.

One hundred and forty-nine mainly critically ill or comatose patients or patients with problems of gastro-intestinal tolerability and/or absorption have been treated during the last few years with a parenteral formulation of rifampicin made available for release in special cases, on humanitarian grounds. The cases reported include ninety-seven tuberculous patients (eighteen of whom were suffering from tubercular meningitis) and fifty-two patients suffering from non-tuberculous infections, including twenty-two cases of sepsis (fifteen due to staphylococci), four cases of bacterial meningitis and four cases of Legionnaires' disease. R ifampicin was administered in each case, together with at least one other suitable antibacterial agent, mainly by intravenous bolus injection (seventy-four cases) or intravenous drip infusion (forty-four cases), at daily doses ranging from 150 to 1800 mg. The duration of treatment ranged from 1 to 113 days. Data allowing an assessment of effectiveness were made available for sixty-eight tuberculous patients, sixty-three of which (92.6%) showed favourable results, and for twenty-seven patients with non-tuberculous infections, nineteen of which (70.4%) had a favourable outcome. Especially favourable were the results in the cases of staphylococcal sepsis (78.6% of clinical and/or bacteriological cures). Tolerability was good in most cases. Only fourteen of the 149 patients showed signs of local intolerability (thrombo-phlebitis), almost always occurring in patients treated for over 60 days. Fifteen patients (10%) complained of systemic unwanted effects, the relationship of which to the treatment was not always established. Treatment was finally withdrawn because of tolerability problems in only three of the 149 cases (2%). Bearing in mind the very varied nature of the severe, life-threatening infections reported here, two comments may be made: Intravenous rifampicin is useful and even life-saving in both severe tuberculous and non-tuberculous infections. It is safe even in long-term administration. However, treatments lasting over 30–60 days appear to involve a higher risk of venous thrombo-phlebitis.

The monitoring of saliva drug levels: psychiatric applications.

An overview is presented of the status of human saliva as a clinical monitoring medium in medicine and psychiatry. Despite the present controversy about the reliability of saliva lithium levels, an evaluation of the prospects of saliva for other pharmacokinetic estimations as well is recommended. The second part of the paper outlines the authors' attempt to expand the use of saliva monitoring in a depot neuroleptic clinic and a methadone maintenance program. This technique, well accepted by the patient populations, is found useful as a screening tool for drug use and compliance can be checked. It can also be indicated prior to the evaluation of the toxicity of prescribed medication as well as the assessment of drug interaction. On humanitarian, clinical and economical grounds, further investigation of the clinical applications of saliva in psychiatric practice is warranted.

Humanitarian Military Intervention

Government-sanctioned mass killings in Kampuchea and Uganda in recent years argue forcefully for military intervention on humanitarian grounds. While international law does permit such intervention in special circumstances, there remains the need to devise satisfactory procedures for carrying out this intervention as well as effective international mechanisms to ensure that it is not used to promote a nation's own self-interest.

Understanding Children's Advocacy in the Health Sector

CHILD ADVOCACY Children cannot always articulate their own interests or make their own decisions; even though their abilities increase substantially and predictably throughout childhood, society is forced to find ways to make decisions for children. Children's advocacy is an attempt to improve the lives of children through attention to the decisions that affect children. Advocacy is "intervention on behalf of children in relation to those services and institutions that impinge on their lives."1 During the late 1960s and early 1970s, different enterprises have been conducted under the rubric of children's advocacy. They have been initiated or funded by both public and private sources at all levels: national, state, and local. Surveys of children's advocacy activities, most notably a national base line survey conducted by Kahn et al,1 have attempted to define children's advocacy activities. After extensive field work, Kahn and colleagues summarized the diversity of children's advocacy activities: ...affirming new concepts of legal entitlements; offering needed services in areas where none existed; persisting in the provision of services when other more conventional programs dropped cases; assuring access to entitlements and help; mediating between children or families and institutions such as schools, health facilities, and courts; and facilitating self-organization among deprived community groups, adolescents, or parents of handicapped children.1(p9) Health care is an area where society has a considerable interest in good decision-making on behalf of children. On humanitarian grounds, society has a caretaker interest and responsibility. On economic grounds, society benefits from the healthy development of its children, who represent a resource pool.

The Reick Telegram and the Spanish-American War: A Reappraisal

One of the most controversial subjects relating to the origins of the Spanish-American War is the attitude of the business community toward the approaching conflict in the winter and early spring of 1898. Writing in the 1930s, Julius W. Pratt found that “the overwhelming preponderance of general business opinion” opposed intervention in Cuba. “After the middle of March 1898,” Pratt went on, “some conservative forces came to think intervention inevitable on humanitarian grounds, but many of the most influential business journals opposed it to the end.”1 Three decades later Walter LaFeber challenged Pratt's thesis. In The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860–1898 (1963), LaFeber contended that business attitudes began to shift “during the last two weeks in March when influential business spokesmen began to welcome the possibility of war in order to end the suspense which shrouded the commercial exchanges.” Philip S. Foner agreed in 1972. “With the support of a substantial section of, if not the entire, business community, McKinley moved to war,” he wrote. The LaFeber thesis has not entirely supplanted the Pratt argument, but the role of the business community in legitimizing war with Spain receives a greater emphasis among diplomatic historians in the wake of LaFeber's work.2

Judging the Quality of Students' Writing: When and How

Thomas P. Hogan Carol J. Mishler University of Wisconsin-Green Bay Perhaps no topic in all the language arts generates more heat and confusion than the judging of students' writing. Some educators rail against the practice on humanitarian grounds, asserting that it stifles creativity, disregards individuality, and has assorted other nasty consequences. One author recently declared that judging quality is OK for hogs at the state fair but not for children's writing (1:358). Some researchers tell us that judging the quality of writing is fraught with all kinds of occult psychometric problems: unreliability, invalidity, and lack of normative framework. What's worse, these researchers insist that a multiple-choice test is a better indicator of writing ability than a direct measure of writing itself is (2; 3:40). Over the past few years reports on the quality of students' writing have brought the wrath of a nation down on the heads of

Anerkjennelse av flyktninger i Norge

Anerkjennelse av flyktninger i Norge

Nixon and the strategy of avoidance

A synthesis of the rhetorical strategies employed by the Nixon campaign indicates that campaign's dominant task was avoidance. The essay examines the implications of that strategy on humanitarian and pragmatic grounds.

Pay Benefits during Retraining under Unemployment Insurance?

President Nixon's recommendations on unemployment insurance legislation in 1969 will undoubtedly hit some snags as they pertain to the payment of benefits to claimants who are being retrained. nature of the interests of parties involved are reasonably clear. Unclear, however, is the nature of the evidence on which the recommendation was made. California's experience may be interpreted as discouraging when one examines the employment patterns of retrained workers. It should at least raise some questions about the viability of unemployment insurance systems for manpower developnment. On July 8, 1969, President Nixon recommended Federal and State legislative action to strengthen the unemployment insurance system. Six recommendations were made, one of which advocated ending the restrictions imposed by half the states on payments to unemployed workers undergoing retraining.' President's recommendations (on the same day, Secretary of Labor Shultz sent Robert C. Goshay is Associate Professor in the School of Business Administration, University of California, Berkeley. This paper wNas presented at the A.R.I.A. 1969 Annual Meeting. 'The others were: We should act together to extend unemployment protection to more employees, including manv highly vulnerable to layoffs who are not now covered. The States should make certain that workers throughouit the United States receive enough money for a long enough period of time to sustain themiwxhile they seek new jobs. We shotuld better protect the investment made on behalf of the insured by seeing to it that the funds are paid only to those who should receive them. XVe should increase the responsiveness of the system to major changes in national economic conditions, We should strengthen the financing of the system which presently discriminates against the low-waage worker and the steady employer. proposed legislation to the Congress) will undoubtedly be opposed by some, and if enacted into law, will pose some knotty administrative problems for states not restricting benefits as well as those who fonnerly restricted. Further, the President's recommendation obviously is an attempt to encourage retraining efforts by the states. This encouragement is an explicit goal in his message to the Congress. goal, of course, presumes a high value can be attached to retraining on several grounds, such as lowering the overall unemployment rate, achieving a more equitable distribution of job opportunities, and on humanitarian grounds. It is the purpose of this paper to explore the nature of some of the potential opposition to this legislation, outline some of the administrative problems attendant to its passage and, finally, describe certain data on the employment experience of a group of retrained workers in California. These data raise questions, at least, concerning the value of the retraining provisions in state unemployment insurance

What's Wrong with the United States Foreign Aid Programme?

The main problem with foreign aid in today's world is that there is not enough of it. Reasonable calculations by cautious development economists suggest that the aid needed in the early 1970s to enable the developing economies to grow at the maximum possible (and presumably desirable) rate, given their capacity to absorb capital inflows productively, is only about one per cent of the aggregate net national income of the rich countries. From this it follows that there is in general no insuperable economic problem in expanding foreign aid and that the fundamental donor problem is a political one of acceptance. Still, although the required total volume of aid looks small in relation to prospective donor national income, it is much larger than current flows, especially when netted of debt service charges and shorn (as they should be) of such essentially commercial transactions as loans at free market rates of interest and easy credit terms designed primarily to subsidize domestic industries. The basis for these statements is, I believe, a relatively hardheaded and conservative appraisal of the probable economic performance of major individual developing and developed countries, of the prospects for commodity exports, and so on. No account has been taken in these calculations of the need, passionately felt by some, for vastly increased international redistribution of income and wealth on purely humanitarian or egalitarian grounds. Yet, even this minimal prospectus of what is needed by way of aid -needed on any reasonable terms -looks wildly Utopian in the light of the recent experience of slackening aid outflows and lessening enthusiasm for the whole idea in most Western countries.

Psychology and the 1970s

Yesterday's science fiction is today's achievement. Subliminal visual and auditory stimuli in politics and education are as possible as in advertising. Delgado's experiments show how behaviour can be radio-controlled by an operator, and Olds has demonstrated the effects on behaviour of stimulation of the plain or pleasure centres. Fetizon and Magat have recently discussed psychochemical warfare. Less obviously disturbing are the possibilities that, as Professor Lee warns. “Modification of the personality by operation, drugs or brainwashing will increasingly be countenanced and justified on ‘humanitarian grounds’ ‘how much better to brain-wash a criminal than to imprison him’.” Yet psychology offers also hopes that incapacitating behaviour problems and social interactions may be genuinely changed, to human advantage. What are the professional ethics of experiment which lead to these various possibilities?

MEDICAL TERMINATION OF PREGNANCY

A discussion supporting India's Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act of 1971 is presented. The liberalized legislation allows a woman to obtain an abortion on humanitarian grounds (e.g., pregnancy as a result of rape), on the grounds of grave danger to physical or mental health, and on eugenic grounds. It is emphasized that the new legislation is not intended to encourage abortion as a method of birth control.

The Nonprofessional in Correction

Correction can contribute to resolving the broad social prob lem of automation-induced unemployment as well as its own professional manpower problem by developing new roles for non professionals (including the offender group) in correctional pro grams. There are already solid bases in theory and experience for such roles in self-help, research and self-study, staff training, program planning, and various subprofessional tasks. These roles need to be given official status in personnel classification and com pensation structures, and career ladders need to be developed. Professionals need not be alarmed on either humanitarian or self-interest grounds, but they will need to adapt imaginatively to new training and supervisory functions in relation to non professionals incorporated into the professional structure. The War on Poverty provides special opportunities for developing and testing these new nonprofessional roles.

Quakers and Chimney-Sweepers: A Postscript

At least twelve years before Parliament passed the Act of 1840, prohibiting the employment of minors in removing soot from or extinguishing flames in chimneys, Quakers were donating money to local associations founded to improve the wretched condition of the little sweeps, as well as to the London headquarters of the Society for Superseding the Necessity of Climbing Boys.2 Although these philanthropic societies ceased, under the delusion that the Act would put down everywhere the use of child-labor in the flues, master chimney-sweepers in the provinces, scoffing at any legislative interference in their sooty trade, continued the wicked practice of transforming climbable boys into expendable brushes. Once again Quakers responded to the ay of the children by helping to support local associations established to enforce the statute. A more effective method than publicly appealing on humanitarian grounds

Autoriceshaw Business in Poona

This paper embodies some of the findings of an enquiry conducted by me into the passenger and goods transport business in Poona as In 1956-57. As a component of the urban transport system in Poona, autorickshaws were introduced only in 1948. Prior to the introduction of these threewheelers, rickshaws pulled by human beings were operating in the city as public service vehicles, but the tenure of this particular mode of transport proved to be short as they were burned as public carrier in 1949, chiefly on humanitarian grounds. This synchronized with the novel addition of the three-wheeled power-driven rickshaws to the prevalent transport system.

The Communist Problem in East Asia-A Western View

To think clearly about the problems of East Asia, it is desirable to distinguish between the aims of Western policy, the methods available for pursuing them, and the conditions in East Asia to which the methods must be adapted in order to succeed. People in the West have for long had a rich variety of interests in East Asia-economic, cultural and humanitarian. But, for Western governments today, fear of the Soviet Union dwarfs all other interests. Hence their primary concern with East Asia is to prevent the direct or indirect extension of Soviet power. They generally assume that any success for communism, however indigenous its form, will be likely or certain to add strength to the Soviet Union. No doubt the programmes to promote health and welfare win a measure of support on moral and humanitarian grounds, but it is the spur of fear that has awakened Western governments to a new sense of those moral obligations. Three methods are available to the West in this contest with the Soviet Union and communism-military, economic and psychological. The military method may involve direct intervention with military forces, as in Korea, or be limited to the provision of advice, equipment and supplies, as in Indochina. The economic method may take a hundred different forms, from the direct supply of immediate needs, such as food and clothing, to the provision of technical assistance in the planning of long-range development; or it may take the negative form, the embargo. The psychological method is a direct effort, usually through the spoken or written word, to convince East Asians that their true interests are identical with Western interests, not with the interests of the Soviet Union; that they can be allies of the West, but only satellites of the Soviet; that they can be free men if they reject communism, but only slaves if they accept it. This at least is the line set by United States official propaganda, though other Western governments do not always fully adhere to it.

Rabbits and Traps

THE next Parliamentary session will see a bill introduced in the House of Lords by Lord Tredegar to prohibit the use of the steel trap. This bill is now in the final stages of drafting by the University of London Animal Welfare Society, which, as the result of a recent questionnaire, claims to be in possession of overwhelming evidence in favour of the abolition of the trap, both on humanitarian grounds and—strange to relate—because it is claimed that trapping results in a continuance of the rabbit pest. This claim is founded on the experience of certain landowners, who have abandoned trapping for other methods of extermination simply because they have found that extermination was not to be achieved by means of the trap. Landowners may be deemed to be impartial in a matter of this kind; for, naturally, they desire to keep rabbits down. They are also keenly alive to the dangers of the steel trap to fox-hounds, domestic animals, partridges and other game. Another of their objections to the steel trap is that it kills stoats, ferrets and other natural enemies of the rabbit pest.

Letters to Editor

IF I were still in Parliament I should give as cordial support to the Importation of Plumage (Prohibition) Bill as I would have done to the late Lord Avebury's Bill had I been in the House of Lords when he introduced it. But I recognise that if the measure is to receive support from men of science, it must be based mainly on scientific rather than on humanitarian or sentimental grounds.