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Comparative and Foreign Law

Schulich School of Law, Dalhousie University

Series

Critique

Publication Year

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Law

What Is The Purpose Of The Orphan Drug Act?, Matthew Herder Jan 2017

What Is The Purpose Of The Orphan Drug Act?, Matthew Herder

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

The Orphan Drug Act (ODA) [1], first enacted in the United States in 1983, was set up to encourage the development of drugs for rare diseases. At that time, drug therapies for such diseases were rarely developed. Three decades later, a growing proportion of industry research and development (R&D) [2] and regulatory drug approvals [3] target diseases affecting fewer than 200,000 persons in the United States, the prevalence-based threshold of rare disease under the ODA.

In a new article published in PLOS Medicine, Aaron Kesselheim and colleagues document an embedded trend: within the …


Pereira's Attack On Legalizing Euthanasia Or Assisted Suicide: Smoke And Mirrors, Jocelyn Downie, Kenneth Chambaere, Jan L. Bernheim Jan 2012

Pereira's Attack On Legalizing Euthanasia Or Assisted Suicide: Smoke And Mirrors, Jocelyn Downie, Kenneth Chambaere, Jan L. Bernheim

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

In a paper published in Current Oncology, University of Ottawa palliative care physician Jose Pereira states that the, “laws and safeguards [in countries in which euthanasia or assisted suicide have been legalized] are regularly ignored and transgressed in all the jurisdictions, and that transgressions are not prosecuted.” He purports to demonstrate that the safeguards and controls put in place in the permissive jurisdictions are an “illusion.”

In the present paper, we expose problems with the evidence base provided and relied upon by Pereira. It should be noted that we provide only examples of each of the categories of mistakes made …