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NCHS Data can i buy lasix online Brief No. 286, September 2017PDF Versionpdf icon (374 KB)Anjel Vahratian, Ph.D.Key findingsData from the National Health Interview Survey, 2015Among those aged 40–59, perimenopausal women (56.0%) were more likely than postmenopausal (40.5%) and premenopausal (32.5%) women to sleep less than 7 hours, on average, in a 24-hour period.Postmenopausal women aged 40–59 were more likely than premenopausal women aged 40–59 to have trouble falling asleep (27.1% compared with 16.8%, respectively), and staying asleep (35.9% compared with 23.7%), four times or more in the past week.Postmenopausal women aged 40–59 (55.1%) were more likely than premenopausal women aged 40–59 (47.0%) to not wake up feeling well rested 4 days or more in the past week.Sleep duration and quality are important contributors to health and wellness. Insufficient sleep is can i buy lasix online associated with an increased risk for chronic conditions such as cardiovascular disease (1) and diabetes (2). Women may be particularly vulnerable to sleep problems during times of reproductive hormonal change, such as after the menopausal transition. Menopause is “the permanent can i buy lasix online cessation of menstruation that occurs after the loss of ovarian activity” (3).

This data brief describes sleep duration and sleep quality among nonpregnant women aged 40–59 by menopausal status. The age can i buy lasix online range selected for this analysis reflects the focus on midlife sleep health. In this analysis, 74.2% of women are premenopausal, 3.7% are perimenopausal, and 22.1% are postmenopausal. Keywords. Insufficient sleep, menopause, National Health Interview Survey Perimenopausal women were more likely than premenopausal and postmenopausal women to sleep less than 7 hours, on average, in a 24-hour period.More than one in three nonpregnant women aged 40–59 slept less than 7 hours, on average, in a 24-hour period (35.1%) (Figure 1).

Perimenopausal women were most likely to sleep less than 7 hours, on average, in a 24-hour period (56.0%), compared with 32.5% of premenopausal and 40.5% of postmenopausal women. Postmenopausal women were significantly more likely than premenopausal women to sleep less than 7 hours, on average, in a 24-hour period. Figure 1. Percentage of nonpregnant women aged 40–59 who slept less than 7 hours, on average, in a 24-hour period, by menopausal status. United States, 2015image icon1Significant quadratic trend by menopausal status (p <.

0.05).NOTES. Women were postmenopausal if they had gone without a menstrual cycle for more than 1 year or were in surgical menopause after the removal of their ovaries. Women were perimenopausal if they no longer had a menstrual cycle and their last menstrual cycle was 1 year ago or less. Women were premenopausal if they still had a menstrual cycle. Access data table for Figure 1pdf icon.SOURCE.

NCHS, National Health Interview Survey, 2015. The percentage of women aged 40–59 who had trouble falling asleep four times or more in the past week varied by menopausal status.Nearly one in five nonpregnant women aged 40–59 had trouble falling asleep four times or more in the past week (19.4%) (Figure 2). The percentage of women in this age group who had trouble falling asleep four times or more in the past week increased from 16.8% among premenopausal women to 24.7% among perimenopausal and 27.1% among postmenopausal women. Postmenopausal women were significantly more likely than premenopausal women to have trouble falling asleep four times or more in the past week. Figure 2.

Percentage of nonpregnant women aged 40–59 who had trouble falling asleep four times or more in the past week, by menopausal status. United States, 2015image icon1Significant linear trend by menopausal status (p <. 0.05).NOTES. Women were postmenopausal if they had gone without a menstrual cycle for more than 1 year or were in surgical menopause after the removal of their ovaries. Women were perimenopausal if they no longer had a menstrual cycle and their last menstrual cycle was 1 year ago or less.

Women were premenopausal if they still had a menstrual cycle. Access data table for Figure 2pdf icon.SOURCE. NCHS, National Health Interview Survey, 2015. The percentage of women aged 40–59 who had trouble staying asleep four times or more in the past week varied by menopausal status.More than one in four nonpregnant women aged 40–59 had trouble staying asleep four times or more in the past week (26.7%) (Figure 3). The percentage of women aged 40–59 who had trouble staying asleep four times or more in the past week increased from 23.7% among premenopausal, to 30.8% among perimenopausal, and to 35.9% among postmenopausal women.

Postmenopausal women were significantly more likely than premenopausal women to have trouble staying asleep four times or more in the past week. Figure 3. Percentage of nonpregnant women aged 40–59 who had trouble staying asleep four times or more in the past week, by menopausal status. United States, 2015image icon1Significant linear trend by menopausal status (p <. 0.05).NOTES.

Women were postmenopausal if they had gone without a menstrual cycle for more than 1 year or were in surgical menopause after the removal of their ovaries. Women were perimenopausal if they no longer had a menstrual cycle and their last menstrual cycle was 1 year ago or less. Women were premenopausal if they still had a menstrual cycle. Access data table for Figure 3pdf icon.SOURCE. NCHS, National Health Interview Survey, 2015.

The percentage of women aged 40–59 who did not wake up feeling well rested 4 days or more in the past week varied by menopausal status.Nearly one in two nonpregnant women aged 40–59 did not wake up feeling well rested 4 days or more in the past week (48.9%) (Figure 4). The percentage of women in this age group who did not wake up feeling well rested 4 days or more in the past week increased from 47.0% among premenopausal women to 49.9% among perimenopausal and 55.1% among postmenopausal women. Postmenopausal women were significantly more likely than premenopausal women to not wake up feeling well rested 4 days or more in the past week. Figure 4. Percentage of nonpregnant women aged 40–59 who did not wake up feeling well rested 4 days or more in the past week, by menopausal status.

United States, 2015image icon1Significant linear trend by menopausal status (p <. 0.05).NOTES. Women were postmenopausal if they had gone without a menstrual cycle for more than 1 year or were in surgical menopause after the removal of their ovaries. Women were perimenopausal if they no longer had a menstrual cycle and their last menstrual cycle was 1 year ago or less. Women were premenopausal if they still had a menstrual cycle.

Access data table for Figure 4pdf icon.SOURCE. NCHS, National Health Interview Survey, 2015. SummaryThis report describes sleep duration and sleep quality among U.S. Nonpregnant women aged 40–59 by menopausal status. Perimenopausal women were most likely to sleep less than 7 hours, on average, in a 24-hour period compared with premenopausal and postmenopausal women.

In contrast, postmenopausal women were most likely to have poor-quality sleep. A greater percentage of postmenopausal women had frequent trouble falling asleep, staying asleep, and not waking well rested compared with premenopausal women. The percentage of perimenopausal women with poor-quality sleep was between the percentages for the other two groups in all three categories. Sleep duration changes with advancing age (4), but sleep duration and quality are also influenced by concurrent changes in women’s reproductive hormone levels (5). Because sleep is critical for optimal health and well-being (6), the findings in this report highlight areas for further research and targeted health promotion.

DefinitionsMenopausal status. A three-level categorical variable was created from a series of questions that asked women. 1) “How old were you when your periods or menstrual cycles started?. €. 2) “Do you still have periods or menstrual cycles?.

€. 3) “When did you have your last period or menstrual cycle?. €. And 4) “Have you ever had both ovaries removed, either as part of a hysterectomy or as one or more separate surgeries?. € Women were postmenopausal if they a) had gone without a menstrual cycle for more than 1 year or b) were in surgical menopause after the removal of their ovaries.

Women were perimenopausal if they a) no longer had a menstrual cycle and b) their last menstrual cycle was 1 year ago or less. Premenopausal women still had a menstrual cycle.Not waking feeling well rested. Determined by respondents who answered 3 days or less on the questionnaire item asking, “In the past week, on how many days did you wake up feeling well rested?. €Short sleep duration. Determined by respondents who answered 6 hours or less on the questionnaire item asking, “On average, how many hours of sleep do you get in a 24-hour period?.

€Trouble falling asleep. Determined by respondents who answered four times or more on the questionnaire item asking, “In the past week, how many times did you have trouble falling asleep?. €Trouble staying asleep. Determined by respondents who answered four times or more on the questionnaire item asking, “In the past week, how many times did you have trouble staying asleep?. € Data source and methodsData from the 2015 National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) were used for this analysis.

NHIS is a multipurpose health survey conducted continuously throughout the year by the National Center for Health Statistics. Interviews are conducted in person in respondents’ homes, but follow-ups to complete interviews may be conducted over the telephone. Data for this analysis came from the Sample Adult core and cancer supplement sections of the 2015 NHIS. For more information about NHIS, including the questionnaire, visit the NHIS website.All analyses used weights to produce national estimates. Estimates on sleep duration and quality in this report are nationally representative of the civilian, noninstitutionalized nonpregnant female population aged 40–59 living in households across the United States.

The sample design is described in more detail elsewhere (7). Point estimates and their estimated variances were calculated using SUDAAN software (8) to account for the complex sample design of NHIS. Linear and quadratic trend tests of the estimated proportions across menopausal status were tested in SUDAAN via PROC DESCRIPT using the POLY option. Differences between percentages were evaluated using two-sided significance tests at the 0.05 level. About the authorAnjel Vahratian is with the National Center for Health Statistics, Division of Health Interview Statistics.

The author gratefully acknowledges the assistance of Lindsey Black in the preparation of this report. ReferencesFord ES. Habitual sleep duration and predicted 10-year cardiovascular risk using the pooled cohort risk equations among US adults. J Am Heart Assoc 3(6):e001454. 2014.Ford ES, Wheaton AG, Chapman DP, Li C, Perry GS, Croft JB.

Associations between self-reported sleep duration and sleeping disorder with concentrations of fasting and 2-h glucose, insulin, and glycosylated hemoglobin among adults without diagnosed diabetes. J Diabetes 6(4):338–50. 2014.American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology. ACOG Practice Bulletin No. 141.

Management of menopausal symptoms. Obstet Gynecol 123(1):202–16. 2014.Black LI, Nugent CN, Adams PF. Tables of adult health behaviors, sleep. National Health Interview Survey, 2011–2014pdf icon.

2016.Santoro N. Perimenopause. From research to practice. J Women’s Health (Larchmt) 25(4):332–9. 2016.Watson NF, Badr MS, Belenky G, Bliwise DL, Buxton OM, Buysse D, et al.

Recommended amount of sleep for a healthy adult. A joint consensus statement of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and Sleep Research Society. J Clin Sleep Med 11(6):591–2. 2015.Parsons VL, Moriarity C, Jonas K, et al. Design and estimation for the National Health Interview Survey, 2006–2015.

National Center for Health Statistics. Vital Health Stat 2(165). 2014.RTI International. SUDAAN (Release 11.0.0) [computer software]. 2012.

Suggested citationVahratian A. Sleep duration and quality among women aged 40–59, by menopausal status. NCHS data brief, no 286. Hyattsville, MD. National Center for Health Statistics.

2017.Copyright informationAll material appearing in this report is in the public domain and may be reproduced or copied without permission. Citation as to source, however, is appreciated.National Center for Health StatisticsCharles J. Rothwell, M.S., M.B.A., DirectorJennifer H. Madans, Ph.D., Associate Director for ScienceDivision of Health Interview StatisticsMarcie L. Cynamon, DirectorStephen J.

Blumberg, Ph.D., Associate Director for ScienceBeyond weight loss, bariatric surgery was also effective at improving vascular outcomes, a new study found.In a study of more than 300 adults with obesity, there was an average 17.5% loss of initial body weight during a roughly 6-month follow-up period after undergoing bariatric surgery, reported Noyan Gokce, MD, of Boston Medical Center in Massachusetts, and colleagues.Starting at an initial baseline weight of 126 kg (278 lb) on average, these patients dropped down to an average weight of 104 kg (229 lb) at 6 months after surgery, the group wrote in JAMA Network Open.On top of this weight loss benefit, these patients also saw a significant improvement in average endothelium-dependent flow-mediated dilation (FMD), indicating a significant improvement in macrovascular function (9.1% pre-surgery versus 10.2% post-surgery, P=0.001).Patients also saw a significant increase in reactive hyperemia (RH), indicating an improvement in microvasculature following bariatric surgery (764% pre-surgery versus 923% post-surgery, P<0.001).The researchers highlighted that both flow-mediated dilation and reactive hyperemia "have been clinically validated as independent predictors of cardiovascular risk."Vascular function improved even after medications that are known to benefit endothelial function were discontinued, Gokce's group also noted. "[T]hus, the overall cumulative effect of weight loss on vascular function may have been moderated by stoppage of vasculoprotective agents owing to clinical reasons, such as normotension."The researchers also pointed out that all patient subgroups, including Black and white patients, men and women, and those with metabolic syndrome, reaped the benefits of bariatric surgery in regards to weight loss and benefit on microvascular function.Interestingly, even the subgroup of patients with so-called metabolically healthy obesity and low-grade inflammation (high-sensitivity C-reactive protein plasma levels >2 mg/dL) also saw a significant microvascular improvement following surgery. This particular finding suggesting a benefit of bariatric surgery for patients with otherwise metabolically healthy obesity touches "on a growing area of interest and controversy in the field that warrants further investigation," according to the researchers.However, those with metabolically healthy obesity didn't see any significant improvement in macrovascular functioning.Other clinical benefits of bariatric surgery included improvements in hip circumference, waist circumference, and high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol levels.As expected, there was a benefit in HbA1c levels associated with the observed change in flow-mediated dilation. Looking at the entire cohort, there was a 0.5% (95% CI -0.95 to -0.05) drop in flow-mediated dilation associated with every 1-unit drop in HbA1c.The population-based analysis included 307 patients with a BMI of 35 or higher who underwent bariatric surgery at Boston Medical Center from 2001 to 2019. Patients who had recent coronary syndromes, congestive heart failure, malignant neoplasm, systemic , acute illness, or pregnancy were excluded.The bariatric surgery cohort mirrored clinical practice with a large majority being women (80%) and white (65%), limiting the generalizability of the findings.

Average age was 42, and the average BMI of the cohort was 46.Overall, 84% of patients opted for Roux-en-Y gastric bypass, while 16% had either sleeve gastrectomy or laparoscopic adjustable gastric band procedures.The 74% of the cohort who were considered to have "metabolically unhealthy" obesity had to have at least three of the following clinical factors:Abdominal obesity (a waist circumference of at least 102 cm for men or 88 cm for women)Triglyceride level of 150 mg/dL or greaterHDL cholesterol level under 40 mg/dL in men and under 50 mg/dL in womenBlood pressure of at least 130/85 mm Hg or use of any hypertension medicationFasting plasma glucose level of at least 100 mg/dLThose without at least three of these clinical factors were considered to have "metabolically healthy obesity."Because the subset of patients with metabolically healthy obesity were the only group that didn't see both a significant macrovascular and microvascular benefit from surgery, Gokce's group suggested they "represent a mixed population that may benefit from more refined phenotypic classification." Kristen Monaco is a staff writer, focusing on endocrinology, psychiatry, and dermatology news. Based out of the New York City office, she’s worked at the company for nearly five years. Disclosures Gokce and co-authors reported grant support from the National Institutes of Health and from the Boston Nutrition Obesity Research Center.Apovian reported relationships with Novo Nordisk, Orexigen Therapeutics, Gelesis, Allergan, Abbott Nutrition, EnteroMedics, Zafgen, Real Appeal, Nutrisystem, Scientific Intake, Xeno Biosciences, Rhythm Pharmaceuticals, Janssen Pharmaceuticals, Tivity Health, Roman Health Ventures, Jazz Pharmaceuticals, Bariatrix Nutrition, SetPoint Health, and Curavit. No other disclosures were reported..

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Justice, one of adverse reaction of lasix the four Beauchamp and Childress prima facie basic principles of biomedical ethics, is explored in two excellent papers in the current issue of the journal. The papers stem from a British Medical Association (BMA) essay competition on justice and fairness in medical practice and policy. Although the competition was open to (almost) all comers, of the 235 entries both the winning paper by Alistair Wardrope1 and the highly commended runner-up by Zoe Fritz and Caitríona Cox2 were adverse reaction of lasix written by practising doctors—a welcome indication of the growing importance being accorded to philosophical reflection about medical practice and practices within medicine itself. Both papers are thoroughly thought provoking and represent two very different approaches to the topic. Each deserves a careful read.The competition was a component of a BMA 2019/2020 ‘Presidential project’ on fairness and justice and asked candidates to ‘use ethical reasoning and theory to tackle challenging, practical, contemporary, problems in health care and help provide a solution based on an explained and defended sense of fairness/justice’.In this guest editorial I’d like to explain why, in 2018 on becoming president-elect of the BMA, I chose the theme of justice and fairness in medical ethics for my 2019–2020 Presidential project—and why in a world of massive and ever-increasing and remediable health inequalities biomedical ethics requires greater international and interdisciplinary efforts to try to reach agreement on the need to achieve greater ‘health justice’ and to reach agreement on what that commitment actually means and on what in practice it requires.First, some background.

As president I was offered the wonderful opportunity to pursue, with the organisation’s formidable assistance, a ‘project’ adverse reaction of lasix consistent with the BMA’s interests and values. As a hybrid of general medical practitioner and philosopher/medical ethicist, and as a firm defender of the Beauchamp and Childress four principles approach to medical ethics,3 I chose to try to raise the ethical profile of justice and fairness within medical ethics.My first objective was to ask the BMA to ask the World Medical Association (WMA) to add an explicit commitment ‘to strive to practise fairly and justly throughout my professional life’ to its contemporary version of the Hippocratic Oath—the Declaration of Geneva4—and to the companion document the International Code of Medical Ethics.5 The stimulus for this proposal was the WMA’s addition in 2017 of the principle of respect for patients’ autonomy. Important as that addition is, it is widely perceived (though in my own view mistakenly) as being too much focused on adverse reaction of lasix individual patients and not enough on communities, groups and populations. The simple addition of a commitment to fairness and justice would provide a ‘balancing’ moral commitment.Adding the fourth principleIt would also explicitly add the fourth of those four prima facie moral commitments, increasingly widely accepted by doctors internationally. Two of them—benefiting our patients (beneficence) and doing so with as little harm as possible (non-maleficence)—have been an integral part of medical ethics since Hippocratic times.

Respect for autonomy and justice are very much more recent adverse reaction of lasix additions to medical ethics. The WMA, having added respect for autonomy to the Declaration of Geneva, should, I proposed, complete the quartet by adding the ‘balancing’ principle of fairness and justice.Since the Declaration is unlikely to be revised for several years, it seems likely that the proposal to add to it an explicit commitment to practise fairly and justly will have to wait. However, an explicit commitment to justice and adverse reaction of lasix fairness has, at the BMA’s request, been added to the draft of the International Code of Medical Ethics and it seems reasonable to hope and expect that it will remain in the final document.Adding a commitment to fairness and justice is the easy part!. Few doctors would on reflection deny that they ought to try to practise fairly and justly. It is far more difficult to say what is actually meant by this.

Two additional components of my Presidential project—the essay competition and a conference (which with luck will have been held, virtually, shortly before publication of this editorial)—sought to help elucidate just what is meant by practising fairly and justly.One of the most striking features of the essay competition was the readiness of many writers to point to injustices in the context of medical practice and policy and describe ways of remedying them, but without giving a specific account of justice and fairness on the basis of which the diagnosis of injustice was made and the remedy offered.Wardrope’s winning essay comes close to such an approach by challenging the implied premise that an account of justice and fairness must provide some such formal theory adverse reaction of lasix. In preference, he points to the evident injustice and unsustainability of humans’ degradation of ‘the Land’ and its atmosphere and its inhabitants and then challenges some assumptions of contemporary philosophy and ethics, especially what he sees as their anthropocentric and individualistic focus. Instead, he invokes Leopold Aldo’s ‘Land Ethic’ (as well as drawing in aid Isabelle Stenger’s focus on ‘the intrusion adverse reaction of lasix of Gaia’). In his thoughtful and challenging paper, he seeks to refocus our ethics—including our medical ethics and our sense of justice and fairness—on mankind’s exploitative threat, during this contemporary ‘anthropocene’ stage of evolution, to the continuing existence of humans and of all forms of life in our ‘biotic community’. As remedy, the author, allying his approach to those of contemporary virtue ethics, recommends the beneficial outcomes that would be brought about by a sense of fairness and justice—a developed and sensitive ‘ecological conscience’ as he calls it—that embraces the interests of the entire biotic community of which we humans are but a part.Fritz and Cox pursue a very different and philosophically more conventional approach to the essay competition’s question and offer a combination and development of two established philosophical theories, those of John Rawls and Thomas Scanlon, to provide a philosophically robust and practically beneficial methodology for justice and fairness in medical practice and policy.

Briefly summarised, they recommend adverse reaction of lasix a two-stage approach for healthcare justice. First, those faced with a problem of fairness or justice in healthcare or policy should use Thomas Scanlon’s proposed contractualist approach whereby reasonable people seek solutions that they and others could not ‘reasonably reject’. This stage would involve committees of decision-makers and representatives of relevant stakeholders looking at the immediate and longer term impact on existing stakeholders of proposed solutions. They would then adverse reaction of lasix check those solutions against substantive criteria of justice derived from Rawls’ theory (which, via his theoretical device of the ‘veil of ignorance’, Rawls and the authors argue that all reasonable people can be expected to accept!. ).

The Rawlsian criteria relied on adverse reaction of lasix by Fritz and Cox are equity of access to healthcare. The ‘difference principle’ whereby avoidable inequalities of primary goods can only be justified if they benefit the most disadvantaged. The just savings principle, of particular importance for ensuring intergenerational justice and sustainability. And a criterion of increased openness, transparency and accountability.It would adverse reaction of lasix of course be naïve to expect a single universalisable solution to the question ‘what do we mean by fairness and justice in health care?. €™ As the papers by Wardrope1 and Fritz and Cox2 demonstrate, there can be very wide differences of approach in well-defended accounts.

My own hope for my project is to emphasise the importance first of committing ourselves within medicine to practising fairly and justly in whatever branch we adverse reaction of lasix practise. And then to think carefully about what we do mean by that and act accordingly.Following AristotleFor my own part, over 40 years of looking, I have not yet found a single substantive theory of justice that is plausibly universalisable and have had to content myself with Aristotle’s formal, almost content-free but probably universalisable theory, according to which equals should be treated equally and unequals unequally in proportion to the relevant inequalities—what some health economists refer to as horizontal and vertical justice or equity.6Beauchamp and Childress in their recent eighth and ‘perhaps final’ edition of their foundational ‘Principles of biomedical ethics’1 acknowledge that ‘[t]he construction of a unified theory of justice that captures our diverse conceptions and principles of justice in biomedical ethics continues to be controversial and difficult to pin down’.They still cite Aristotle’s formal principle (though with less explanation than in their first edition back in 1979) and they still believe that this formal principle requires substantive or ‘material’ content if it is to be useful in practice. They then describe six different theories of justice—four ‘traditional’ (utilitarian, libertarian, communitarian and egalitarian) and two newer theories, which they suggest may be more helpful in the context of health justice, one based on capabilities and the other on actual well-being.They again end their discussion of justice with their reminder that ‘Policies of just access to health care, strategies of efficiencies in health care institutions, and global needs for the reduction of health-impairing conditions dwarf in social importance every other issue considered in this book’ ……. €˜every society must ration its resources adverse reaction of lasix but many societies can close gaps in fair rationing more conscientiously than they have to date’ [emphasis added]. And they go on to stress their own support for ‘recognition of global rights to health and enforceable rights to health care in nation-states’.For my own part I recommend, perhaps less ambitiously, that across the globe we extract from Aristotle’s formal theory of justice a starting point that ethically requires us to focus on equality and always to treat others as equals and treat them equally unless there are moral justifications for not doing so.

Where such justifications exist we should say what they are, explain the moral assumptions that justify them and, to the extent possible, seek the agreement of those affected.IntroductionIt did not occur to the Governor that there might be more than one definition of what is good … It did not occur to him that while the courts were writing one definition of goodness in adverse reaction of lasix the law books, fires were writing quite another one on the face of the land. (Leopold, ‘Good Oak’1, pp 10–11)As I wrote the abstract that would become this essay, wildfires were spreading across Australia’s east coast. By the time I was invited to write the essay, back-to-back winter storms were flooding communities all around my home. The essay has been written in moments of respite between shifts during the hypertension medications adverse reaction of lasix lasix. Every one of these events was described as ‘unprecedented’.

Yet each is becoming increasingly likely, and that due to our interactions with our environment.Public discourse surrounding these events is dominated by questions of justice and fairness. How to balance competing imperatives of adverse reaction of lasix protecting individual lives against risk of spreading contagion. How best to allocate scarce resources like intensive care beds or mechanical ventilators. The conceptual tools of clinical ethics are well tailored to these sorts of questions adverse reaction of lasix. The rights of the individual versus the community, issues of distributive justice—these are familiar to anyone with even a passing acquaintance with its canonical debates.What biomedical ethics has remained largely silent on is how we have been left to confront these decisions.

How human activity has eroded Earth’s life support systems to make the ‘unprecedented’ the new normal. A medical ethic fit for the Anthropocene—our (still tentative) geological epoch defined by human influence on natural systems—must be able not just to react to the consequences of our exploitation of the natural world, but reimagine our relationship with it.Those reimaginations already exist, if we know where to look for adverse reaction of lasix them. The ‘Land Ethic’ of the US conservationist Aldo Leopold offers one such vision.i Developed over decades of experience working in and teaching land management, the Land Ethic is most famously formulated in an essay of the same name published shortly before Leopold’s death fighting a wildfire on a neighbour’s farm. It begins with a reinterpretation of adverse reaction of lasix the ethical relationship between humanity and the ‘land community’, the ecosystems we live within and depend upon. Moving us from ‘conqueror’ to ‘plain member and citizen’ of that community1 (p 204).

Land ceases to be a resource to be exploited for human need once we view ourselves as part of, and only existing within, the land community. Our moral evaluations shift consonantly:A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, adverse reaction of lasix and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.1 (pp 224–225)The justice of the Land Ethic questions many presuppositions of biomedical ethics. By valuing the community in itself—in a way irreducible to the welfare of its members—it steps away from the individualism axiomatic in contemporary bioethics.2 Viewing ourselves as citizens of the land community also extends the moral horizons of healthcare from a solely human focus, taking seriously the interests of the non-human members adverse reaction of lasix of that community. Taking into account the ‘stability’ of the community requires intergenerational justice—that we consider those affected by our actions now, and their implications for future generations.3 The resulting vision of justice in healthcare—one that takes climate and environmental justice seriously—could offer health workers an ethic fit for the future, demonstrating ways in which practice must change to do justice to patients, public and planet—now and in years to come.Healthcare in the AnthropoceneSeemeth it a small thing unto you to have fed upon good pasture, but ye must tread down with your feet the residue of your pasture?.

And to have drunk of the clear waters, but ye must foul the residue with your feet?. (Ezekiel 34:18, quoted in Leopold, ‘Conservation in the Southwest’4, p 94)The majority of the development of human societies worldwide—including all of recorded human history—has taken place within a single geological epoch, a roughly 11 600 yearlong period of relative warmth and climatic stability known as the Holocene adverse reaction of lasix. That stability, however, can no longer be taken for granted. The epoch that has sustained most of human development is giving way to one shaped by the planetary consequences of that development—the Anthropocene.The Anthropocene is marked by accelerating degradation of the ecosystems that have sustained human societies. Human activity is already estimated to have raised global temperatures 1°C above preindustrial levels, and if emissions continue at current levels we are likely to reach 1.5°C between 2030 and 2052.5 adverse reaction of lasix The global rate of species extinction is orders of magnitude higher than the average over the past 10 million years.6 Ocean acidification, deforestation and disruption of nitrogen and phosphorus flows are likely at or beyond sustainable planetary boundaries.7Yet this period has also seen rapid (if uneven) improvements in human health, with improved life expectancy, falling child mortality and falling numbers of people living in extreme poverty.

The 2015 report of the Rockefeller Foundation-Lancet Commission on planetary health explained this dissonance in stark terms. €˜we have been mortgaging the health of future generations to realise economic and development gains in the present.’7In the instrumental rationality of modernity, nature has featured adverse reaction of lasix only as inexhaustible resource and infinite sink to fuel social and economic ends. But this disenchanted worldview can no longer hide from the implausibility of these assumptions. It cannot resist what the philosopher Isabelle Stengers has called ‘the intrusion of Gaia’.8 The present lasix—made more likely by deforestation, land use change and biodiversity loss9—is just the most immediately salient of these intrusions. Anthropogenic environmental changes are increasing undernutrition, increasing range adverse reaction of lasix and transmissibility of many vectorborne and waterborne diseases like dengue fever and cholera, increasing frequency and severity of extreme weather events like heatwaves and wildfires, and driving population exposure to air pollution—which already accounts for over 7 million deaths annually.10These intrusions will shape healthcare in the Anthropocene.

This is because health workers will have to deal with their consequences, and because modern industrialised healthcare as practised in most high-income countries—and considered aspirational elsewhere—was borne of the same worldview that has mortgaged the health of future generations. The health sector in the USA is estimated to adverse reaction of lasix account for 8% of the country’s greenhouse gas footprint.11 Pharmaceutical production and waste causes more local environmental degradation, accumulating in water supplies with damaging effects for local flora and fauna.12 Public health has similarly embraced short-term gains with neglect of long-term consequences. Health messaging was instrumental to the development and popularisation of many disposable and single-use products, while a 1947 report funded by the Rockefeller Foundation (who would later fund the landmark 2015 Lancet report on planetary health) popularised the high-meat, high-dairy ‘American’ diet—dependent on fossil fuel-driven intensive agricultural practices—as the healthy ideal.13Healthcare fit for the Anthropocene requires a shift in perspectives that allows us to see and work with the intrusion of Gaia. But can dominant approaches in bioethics incorporate that shift?. A perfect moral stormWe have built a beautiful piece of social machinery … which is coughing along on two cylinders because we have been too timid, and too anxious for quick success, to adverse reaction of lasix tell the farmer the true magnitude of his obligations.

(Leopold, ‘The Ecological Conscience’4, p 341)At local, national and international scales, the lifestyles of the wealthiest pose an existential threat to the poorest and most marginalised in society. Our actions now are depriving future generations of the environmental prerequisites of good health and social adverse reaction of lasix flourishing. If justice means, as Ranaan Gillon parses it, ‘the moral obligation to act on the basis of fair adjudication between competing claims’,14 then this state of affairs certainly seems unjust. However, the tools available for grappling with questions of justice in bioethics seem ill equipped to deal with these sorts of injustice.To illustrate this problem, consider how Gillon further fleshes out his description of justice. In terms of fair distribution of scarce resources, respect for people’s rights, and respect for adverse reaction of lasix morally acceptable laws.

The first of these—labelled distributive justice—concerns how fairly to allot finite resources among potential beneficiaries. Classic problems of distributive justice in healthcare concern a group of people at a particular time (usually patients), who could each benefit from a particular resource (historically, discussions have often focused on transplant organs. More recently, intensive care adverse reaction of lasix beds and ventilators have come to the fore). But there are fewer of these resources than there are people with a need for them. Such discussions are not adverse reaction of lasix easy, but they are at least familiar—we know where to begin with them.

We can consider each party’s need, their potential to benefit from the resource, any special rights or other claims they may have to it, and so forth. The distribution of benefits and harms in the Anthropocene, however, does not comfortably fit this formalism. It is one thing to say that there is but adverse reaction of lasix one intensive care bed, from which Smith has a good chance of gaining another year of life, Jones a poor chance, and so offer it to Smith. Another entirely to say that production of the materials consumed in Smith’s care has contributed to the degradation of scarce water supplies on the other side of the globe, or that the unsustainable pattern of energy use will affect innumerable other future persons in poorly quantifiable ways through fuelling climate change. The calculations of distributive justice are well suited to problems where there are a set pool of potential beneficiaries, and the use of the scarce resources available affects only those within that adverse reaction of lasix pool.

But global environmental problems do not fit this pattern—the effects of our actions are spatially and temporally dispersed, so that large numbers of present and future people are affected in different ways.Nor can this problem be readily addressed by turning to Gillon’s second category of obligations of justice, those grounded in human rights. For while it might be plausible (if not entirely uncontroversial) to say that those communities whose water supplies are degraded by pharmaceutical production have a right to clean water, it is another thing entirely to say that Smith’s healthcare is directly violating that right. It would not be true to say that, were it not adverse reaction of lasix for the resources used in caring for Smith, that the communities in question would face no threat to water security—indeed, they would likely make no appreciable difference. Similarly for the effects of Smith’s care on future generations facing accelerating environmental change.iiThe issue here is of fragmentation of agency. While it is not the case that Smith’s care is directly responsible for these environmental harms, the cumulative consequences of many such acts—and the ways in which these acts are embedded in particular systems of energy generation, waste management, international trade, and so on—are reliably producing these adverse reaction of lasix harms.

The injustice is structural, in Iris Marion Young’s terminology—arising from the ways in which social structures constrain individuals from pursuing certain courses of action, and enable them to follow others, with side effects that cumulatively produce devastating impacts.15Gillon describes the third component of justice as respect for morally acceptable laws. But there is little reason to believe that existing legal frameworks provide sufficient guidance to address these structural injustices. While the intricacies of global governance are well beyond what I can hope to address here, the stark fact remains that, despite the international commitment of the 2015 Paris Agreement to attempt to keep global temperature rise to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that present national commitments—even if these are substantially increased in coming years—will take us well beyond that target.5 Confronted by adverse reaction of lasix such institutional inadequacy, respect for the rule of law is inadequate to remedy injustice.The confluence of these particular features—dispersion of causes and effects, fragmentation of agency and institutional inadequacy—makes it difficult for us to reason ethically about the choices we have to make. Stephen Gardiner calls this a ‘perfect moral storm’.16 Each of these factors individually would be difficult to address using the resources of contemporary biomedical ethics. Their convergence makes it seem insurmountable.This perfect storm was not, however, unpredictable.

Van Rensselaer Potter, a professor of Oncology responsible for introducing the term ‘bioethics’ into Anglophone adverse reaction of lasix discourse, observed that since he coined the phrase, the study of bioethics had diverged from his original usage (governing all issues at the intersection of ethics and the biological sciences) to a narrow focus on the moral dilemmas arising in interactions between individuals in biomedical contexts. Potter predicted that the short-term, individualistic and medicalised focus of this approach would result in a neglect of population-level and ecological-level issues affecting human and planetary health, with catastrophic consequences.17 His proposed solution was a new ‘global bioethics’, grounded in a new understanding of humanity’s position within planetary systems—one articulated by the Land Ethic.The Land EthicA land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such.iii (Leopold, ‘The Land Ethic’1, p 204)Developed throughout a career in forestry, conservation and wildlife management, the Land Ethic is less an attempt to provide a set of maxims for moral action, than to shift our adverse reaction of lasix perspectives of the moral landscape. In his working life, Aldo Leopold witnessed how actions intended to optimise short-term economic outcomes eroded the environments on which we depend—whether soil degradation arising from intensive farming and deforestation, or disruption of freshwater ecosystems by industrial dairy farming. He also saw that contemporary morality remained silent on such actions, even when their consequences were to the collective detriment of all.Leopold argued that a series of ‘historical accidents’ left our morality particularly ill suited to handle these intrusions of Gaia—with a worldview that considered them ‘intrusions’, rather than the predictable response of our biotic community.

These ‘accidents’ adverse reaction of lasix were. The unusual resilience of European ecological communities to anthropogenic interference (England survived an almost wholesale deforestation without consequent loss of ecosystem resilience, while similar changes elsewhere resulted in permanent environmental degradation). And the legacy of European settler colonialism, meaning that an ethic arising in adverse reaction of lasix these particular conditions came to dominate global social arrangements4 (p 311). The first of these supported a worldview in which ‘Land … is … something to be tamed rather than something to be understood, loved, and lived with. Resources are still regarded as separate entities, indeed, as commodities, rather than as our cohabitants in the land community’4 (p 311).

The second enabled the marginalisation of other views adverse reaction of lasix. In this genealogy, Leopold anticipated the perfect moral storm discussed above. His intent with the Land Ethic was to navigate it.There are three key components adverse reaction of lasix of the Land Ethic that comprise the first three sections of Leopold’s final essay on the subject. (1) the ‘community concept’ that allows communities as wholes to have intrinsic value. (2) the ‘ethical sequence’ that situates the value of such communities as extending, not replacing, values assigned to individuals.

And (3) the ‘ecological conscience’ that views ethical action not in terms of following a particular code, but in developing appropriate moral adverse reaction of lasix perception.The community conceptThe most widely quoted passage of Leopold’s opus—already cited above, and frequently (mis)taken as a summary maxim of the ethic—states that:A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.1 (pp 224–225)This passage makes the primary object of our moral responsibilities ‘the biotic community’, a term Leopold uses interchangeably with the ‘land community’. Leopold’s community concept is notable in at least three respects. Its holism—an embrace of the adverse reaction of lasix moral significance of communities in a way that is not simply reducible to the significance of its individual members. Its understanding of communities as temporally extended, placing importance on their ‘integrity’ and ‘stability’.

And its rejection of anthropocentrism, affording humanity a place as ‘plain member and citizen’ of a broader land community.Individualism is so prevalent in biomedical ethics that it is scarcely argued adverse reaction of lasix for, instead forming part of the ‘background constellation of values’2 tacitly assumed within the field. We are used to evaluating the well-being of a community as a function of the well-being of its individual members—this is the rationale underlying quality-adjusted life year calculations endemic within health economics, and most discussions of distributive justice adopt some variation of this approach. Holism instead proposes that this makes no more sense than evaluating a person’s well-being as an aggregate of the well-being of their individual organs. While we can sensibly talk about people’s hearts, livers or kidneys, their health is defined in terms of and constitutively adverse reaction of lasix dependent on the health of the person as a whole. Similarly, holism proposes, while individuals can be identified separately, it only makes sense to talk about them and their well-being in the context of the larger biotic community which supports and defines us.Holism helps us to negotiate the issues that confront individualistic accounts of collective well-being in Anthropocene health injustices.

In the previous section, we found in the environmental consequences of industrialised healthcare that it is difficult to identify which parties in particular are harmed, and how much each individual action adverse reaction of lasix contributes to those harms. But our intuition that the overall result is unfair or unjust is itself a holistic assessment of the overall outcome, not dependent on our calculation of the welfare of every party involved. Holism respects the intuition that says—no matter the individuals involved—a world where people now exploit ecological resources in a fashion that deprives people in the future of the prerequisites of survival, is worse than one where communities now and in the future live in a sustainable relationship with their environment.The second aspect of Leopold’s community concept is that the community is something that does not exist at a single time and place—it is defined in terms of its development through time. Promoting the ‘integrity’ and ‘stability’ of the community requires that we not just consider its immediate interests, but how that will affect adverse reaction of lasix its long-term sustainability or resilience. We saw earlier the difficulties in trying to say just who is harmed and how when we approach harm to future generations individualistically.

But from the perspective of the Land Ethic, adverse reaction of lasix when we exploit environmental resources in ways that will have predictable damaging results for future generations, the object of our harm is not just some purely notional future person. It is a presently existing, temporally extended entity—the community of which they will be part.Lastly, Leopold’s community is quite consciously a biotic—not merely human—community. Leopold defines the land community as the open network of energy and mineral exchange that sustains all aspects of that network:Land… is not merely soil. It is a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants, and adverse reaction of lasix animals. Food chains are the living channels which conduct energy upward.

Death and decay return it to the soil. The circuit is not closed adverse reaction of lasix. Some energy is dissipated in decay, some is added by absorption, some is stored in soils, peats, and forests, but it is a sustained circuit, like a slowly augmented revolving fund of life.4 (pp 268–269)While the components within this network may change, the land community as a whole remains stable when the overall complexity of the network is not disrupted—other components are able to adjust to these changes, or new ones arise to take their place.ivThe normative inference Leopold makes from his understanding of the land community is this. It makes no sense to single out individual entities within the community as being especially valuable or adverse reaction of lasix useful, without taking into account the whole community upon which they mutually depend. To do so is self-defeating.

By privileging the interests of a few members of the community, we ultimately undermine the prerequisites of their existence.The ethical sequenceThe Land Ethic’s holism is in fact its most frequently critiqued feature. Its emphasis on the value of the biotic community leads some to allege a subjugation of individual interests to the needs adverse reaction of lasix of the environment. This critique neglects how Leopold positions the Land Ethic in what he calls the ‘ethical sequence’. This is the gradual extension of scope of ethical considerations, both in terms of the complexity of social interactions they cover (from interactions between two people, to the structure of progressively larger social groups), and in the kinds of person they acknowledge as worthy of moral consideration (as we resist, for example, classist, sexist or racist exclusions from personhood).This sequence serves less as a description of the adverse reaction of lasix history of morality, than a prescription for how we should understand the Land Ethic as adding to, rather than supplanting, our responsibilities to others. We do not argue that taking seriously health workers’ responsibilities for public health and health promotion supplants their duties to the patients they work with on a daily basis.

Similarly, the Land Ethic implies ‘respect for [our] fellow members, and also respect for the community as such’1 (p 204). At times, our responsibilities towards these adverse reaction of lasix different parties may come into tension. But balancing these responsibilities has always been part of the work of clinical ethics.The ecological conscienceIf the community concept gives a definition of the good, and the ethical sequence situates this definition within the existing moral landscape, neither offers an explicit decision procedure to guide right action. In arguing for the adverse reaction of lasix ‘ecological conscience’, Leopold explains his rationale for not attempting to articulate such a procedure. In his career as conservationist, Leopold witnessed time and again laws nominally introduced in the name of environmental protection that did little to achieve their long-term goals, while exacerbating other environmental threats.v This is not surprising, given the ‘perfect moral storm’ of Anthropocene global health and environmental threats discussed above.

The cumulative results of apparently innocent actions can be widespread and damaging.Leopold’s response to this problem is to advocate the cultivation of an ‘ecological conscience’. What is needed to promote a healthy human relationship with the land community is not for us to be told exactly how and how not to act in the face of environmental health threats, but rather to shift our view of the land from ‘a commodity belonging adverse reaction of lasix to us’ towards ‘a community to which we belong’1 (p viii). To understand what the Land Ethic requires of us, therefore, we should learn more about the land community and our relationship with it, to develop our moral perception and extend its scope to embrace the non-human members of our community.Seen in this light, the Land Ethic shares much in common with virtue ethics, where right action is defined in terms of what the moral agent would do, rather than vice versa. But rather than the Eudaimonia of individual human flourishing proposed by Aristotle, the phronimos of the Land Ethic sees their telos coming from their position within the land community. While clinical virtue ethicists have traditionally taken the virtues of medical practice to be grounded in the interaction adverse reaction of lasix with individual patients, the realities of healthcare in the Anthropocene mean that limiting our moral perceptions in this way would ultimately be self-defeating—hurting those very patients we mean to serve (and many more besides).18 The virtuous clinician must adopt a view of the moral world that can focus on a person both as an individual, and simultaneously as member of the land community.

I will close by exploring how adopting that perspective might change our practice.Justice in the AnthropoceneFailing this, it seems to me we fail in the ultimate test of our vaunted superiority—the self-control of environment. We fall back into the biological category of the potato adverse reaction of lasix bug which exterminated the potato, and thereby exterminated itself. (Leopold, ‘The River of the Mother of God’4, p 127)I have articulated some of the challenges healthcare faces in the Anthropocene. I have suggested that the tools presently available to clinical ethics may be inadequate to meet them. The Land Ethic invites us to reimagine our position in and relationship with the adverse reaction of lasix land community.

I want to close by suggesting how the development of an ecological conscience might support a transition to more just healthcare. I will not endeavour to give detailed prescriptions for action, adverse reaction of lasix given Leopold’s warnings about the limitations of such codifications. Rather, I will attempt to show how the cultivation of an ecological conscience might change our perception of what justice demands. Following the tradition of virtue ethics with which the Land Ethic holds much in common, this is best achieved by looking at models of virtuous action, and exploring what makes it virtuous.19Industrialised healthcare developed within a paradigm that saw the environment as inert resource and held that the scope of clinical ethics ranged only over the clinician’s interaction with their patients. When we begin to see clinician and patient not as standing apart from the environment, but as ‘member and citizen of the land community’, their relationship with adverse reaction of lasix one another and with the world around them changes consonantly.

The present lasix has only begun to make commonplace the idea that health workers do not simply treat infectious diseases, but interact with them in a range of ways, including as vector—and as a result our moral obligations in confronting them may extend beyond the immediate clinical encounter, to cover all the other ways we may contract or spread disease. But we adverse reaction of lasix may be responsible for disease outbreaks with conditions other than hypertension medications, and in ways beyond simply becoming infected. The development of an ecological conscience would show how our practices of consumption may fuel deforestation that accelerates the emergence of novel pathogens, or support intensive animal rearing that drives antibiotic resistance.18The Land Ethic also challenges us not to abstract our work away from the places in which it takes place. General practitioner surgeries and hospitals are situated within social and land communities alike, shaping and shaped by them. These spaces can be used in ways adverse reaction of lasix that support or undermine those communities.

Surgeries can work to empower their communities to pursue more sustainable and healthy diets by doubling as food cooperatives, or providing resources and ‘social prescriptions’ for increased walking and cycling. Hospitals can use their extensive real estate to provide publicly accessible green and wild spaces within urban environments, and use their role as major nodes in transport infrastructure to change that infrastructure to support active travel alternatives.ivThe Land Ethic reminds us that a community (human or land) is not healthy if its flourishing cannot be sustainably maintained. An essential component of Anthropocene health justice is intergenerational justice adverse reaction of lasix. Contemporary industrialised healthcare has an unsustainable ecological footprint. Continuing with adverse reaction of lasix such a model of care would serve only to mortgage the health of future generations for the sake of those living now.

Ecologically conscious practice must take seriously the sorts of downstream, distributed consequences of activity that produce anthropogenic global health threats, and evaluate to what extent our most intensive healthcare practices truly serve to promote public and planetary health. It is not enough for the clinician to assume that our resource usage is a necessary evil in the pursuit of best clinical outcomes, for it is already apparent that much of our environmental exploitation is of minimal or even negative long-term value. The work of the National Health adverse reaction of lasix Service (NHS) Sustainable Development Unit has seen a 10% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions in the NHS from 2007 to 2015 despite an 18% increase in clinical activity,20 while different models of care used in less industrialised nations manage to provide high-quality health outcomes in less resource-intensive fashion.21ConclusionOur present problem is one of attitudes and implements. We are remodelling the Alhambra with a steam-shovel. We shall hardly relinquish the steam-shovel, which adverse reaction of lasix after all has many good points, but we are in need of gentler and more objective criteria for its successful use.

(Leopold, ‘The Land Ethic’1, p 226)The moral challenges of the Anthropocene do not solely confront health workers. But the potentially catastrophic health effects of anthropogenic global environmental change, and the contribution of healthcare activity to driving these changes provide a specific and unique imperative for action from health workers.Yet it is hard to articulate this imperative in the language of contemporary clinical ethics, ill equipped for this intrusion of Gaia. Justice in the Anthropocene requires us to be able to adopt a perspective from which these changes no longer appear as unexpected intrusions, but that acknowledges the land community as part of our moral adverse reaction of lasix community. The Land Ethic articulates an understanding of justice that is holistic, structural, intergenerational, and rejects anthropocentrism. This understanding seeks not to supplant, but to adverse reaction of lasix augment, our existing one.

It aims to do so by helping us to develop an ‘ecological conscience’, seeing ourselves as ‘plain member and citizen’ of the land community. The Land Ethic does not provide a step-by-step guide to just action. Nor does it definitively adjudicate on how to balance the interests of our patients, other populations now and adverse reaction of lasix in the future, and the planet. It could, however, help us on the first step towards that change—showing how to cultivate the ‘internal change in our intellectual emphasis, loyalties, affections, and convictions’1 (pp 209–210) necessary to realise the virtues of just healthcare in the Anthropocene.AcknowledgmentsThis essay was written as a submission for the BMA Presidential Essay Prize. I am grateful to the organisers and judging panel for the opportunity..

Justice, one of the four Beauchamp and Childress prima facie basic principles of biomedical ethics, is explored in two excellent papers can i buy lasix online in the current issue of the journal. The papers stem from a British Medical Association (BMA) essay competition on justice and fairness in medical practice and policy. Although the competition was open to (almost) all comers, of can i buy lasix online the 235 entries both the winning paper by Alistair Wardrope1 and the highly commended runner-up by Zoe Fritz and Caitríona Cox2 were written by practising doctors—a welcome indication of the growing importance being accorded to philosophical reflection about medical practice and practices within medicine itself.

Both papers are thoroughly thought provoking and represent two very different approaches to the topic. Each deserves a careful read.The competition was a component of a BMA 2019/2020 ‘Presidential project’ on fairness and justice and asked candidates to ‘use ethical reasoning and theory to tackle challenging, practical, contemporary, problems in health care and help provide a solution based on an explained and defended sense of fairness/justice’.In this guest editorial I’d like to explain why, in 2018 on becoming president-elect of the BMA, I chose the theme of justice and fairness in medical ethics for my 2019–2020 Presidential project—and why in a world of massive and ever-increasing and remediable health inequalities biomedical ethics requires greater international and interdisciplinary efforts to try to reach agreement on the need to achieve greater ‘health justice’ and to reach agreement on what that commitment actually means and on what in practice it requires.First, some background. As president I was offered the wonderful opportunity to pursue, with the organisation’s formidable assistance, a ‘project’ consistent with the BMA’s interests and values can i buy lasix online.

As a hybrid of general medical practitioner and philosopher/medical ethicist, and as a firm defender of the Beauchamp and Childress four principles approach to medical ethics,3 I chose to try to raise the ethical profile of justice and fairness within medical ethics.My first objective was to ask the BMA to ask the World Medical Association (WMA) to add an explicit commitment ‘to strive to practise fairly and justly throughout my professional life’ to its contemporary version of the Hippocratic Oath—the Declaration of Geneva4—and to the companion document the International Code of Medical Ethics.5 The stimulus for this proposal was the WMA’s addition in 2017 of the principle of respect for patients’ autonomy. Important as that addition is, it is widely perceived (though in my own view mistakenly) as being too much focused on individual patients and not enough can i buy lasix online on communities, groups and populations. The simple addition of a commitment to fairness and justice would provide a ‘balancing’ moral commitment.Adding the fourth principleIt would also explicitly add the fourth of those four prima facie moral commitments, increasingly widely accepted by doctors internationally.

Two of them—benefiting our patients (beneficence) and doing so with as little harm as possible (non-maleficence)—have been an integral part of medical ethics since Hippocratic times. Respect for autonomy and justice are very much more recent can i buy lasix online additions to medical ethics. The WMA, having added respect for autonomy to the Declaration of Geneva, should, I proposed, complete the quartet by adding the ‘balancing’ principle of fairness and justice.Since the Declaration is unlikely to be revised for several years, it seems likely that the proposal to add to it an explicit commitment to practise fairly and justly will have to wait.

However, an explicit commitment to justice and can i buy lasix online fairness has, at the BMA’s request, been added to the draft of the International Code of Medical Ethics and it seems reasonable to hope and expect that it will remain in the final document.Adding a commitment to fairness and justice is the easy part!. Few doctors would on reflection deny that they ought to try to practise fairly and justly. It is far more difficult to say what is actually meant by this.

Two additional components of my Presidential project—the essay competition and a conference (which with luck will have been held, can i buy lasix online virtually, shortly before publication of this editorial)—sought to help elucidate just what is meant by practising fairly and justly.One of the most striking features of the essay competition was the readiness of many writers to point to injustices in the context of medical practice and policy and describe ways of remedying them, but without giving a specific account of justice and fairness on the basis of which the diagnosis of injustice was made and the remedy offered.Wardrope’s winning essay comes close to such an approach by challenging the implied premise that an account of justice and fairness must provide some such formal theory. In preference, he points to the evident injustice and unsustainability of humans’ degradation of ‘the Land’ and its atmosphere and its inhabitants and then challenges some assumptions of contemporary philosophy and ethics, especially what he sees as their anthropocentric and individualistic focus. Instead, he invokes Leopold Aldo’s ‘Land Ethic’ (as can i buy lasix online well as drawing in aid Isabelle Stenger’s focus on ‘the intrusion of Gaia’).

In his thoughtful and challenging paper, he seeks to refocus our ethics—including our medical ethics and our sense of justice and fairness—on mankind’s exploitative threat, during this contemporary ‘anthropocene’ stage of evolution, to the continuing existence of humans and of all forms of life in our ‘biotic community’. As remedy, the author, allying his approach to those of contemporary virtue ethics, recommends the beneficial outcomes that would be brought about by a sense of fairness and justice—a developed and sensitive ‘ecological conscience’ as he calls it—that embraces the interests of the entire biotic community of which we humans are but a part.Fritz and Cox pursue a very different and philosophically more conventional approach to the essay competition’s question and offer a combination and development of two established philosophical theories, those of John Rawls and Thomas Scanlon, to provide a philosophically robust and practically beneficial methodology for justice and fairness in medical practice and policy. Briefly summarised, can i buy lasix online they recommend a two-stage approach for healthcare justice.

First, those faced with a problem of fairness or justice in healthcare or policy should use Thomas Scanlon’s proposed contractualist approach whereby reasonable people seek solutions that they and others could not ‘reasonably reject’. This stage would involve committees of decision-makers and representatives of relevant stakeholders looking at the immediate and longer term impact on existing stakeholders of proposed solutions. They would then check those solutions against substantive can i buy lasix online criteria of justice derived from Rawls’ theory (which, via his theoretical device of the ‘veil of ignorance’, Rawls and the authors argue that all reasonable people can be expected to accept!.

). The Rawlsian criteria relied on by Fritz and Cox are equity of access to healthcare can i buy lasix online. The ‘difference principle’ whereby avoidable inequalities of primary goods can only be justified if they benefit the most disadvantaged.

The just savings principle, of particular importance for ensuring intergenerational justice and sustainability. And a criterion of increased openness, transparency and accountability.It would of course be naïve to expect a single universalisable solution to the question ‘what do we mean by fairness and can i buy lasix online justice in health care?. €™ As the papers by Wardrope1 and Fritz and Cox2 demonstrate, there can be very wide differences of approach in well-defended accounts.

My own hope for my project is to emphasise the can i buy lasix online importance first of committing ourselves within medicine to practising fairly and justly in whatever branch we practise. And then to think carefully about what we do mean by that and act accordingly.Following AristotleFor my own part, over 40 years of looking, I have not yet found a single substantive theory of justice that is plausibly universalisable and have had to content myself with Aristotle’s formal, almost content-free but probably universalisable theory, according to which equals should be treated equally and unequals unequally in proportion to the relevant inequalities—what some health economists refer to as horizontal and vertical justice or equity.6Beauchamp and Childress in their recent eighth and ‘perhaps final’ edition of their foundational ‘Principles of biomedical ethics’1 acknowledge that ‘[t]he construction of a unified theory of justice that captures our diverse conceptions and principles of justice in biomedical ethics continues to be controversial and difficult to pin down’.They still cite Aristotle’s formal principle (though with less explanation than in their first edition back in 1979) and they still believe that this formal principle requires substantive or ‘material’ content if it is to be useful in practice. They then describe six different theories of justice—four ‘traditional’ (utilitarian, libertarian, communitarian and egalitarian) and two newer theories, which they suggest may be more helpful in the context of health justice, one based on capabilities and the other on actual well-being.They again end their discussion of justice with their reminder that ‘Policies of just access to health care, strategies of efficiencies in health care institutions, and global needs for the reduction of health-impairing conditions dwarf in social importance every other issue considered in this book’ …….

€˜every society must ration its resources but can i buy lasix online many societies can close gaps in fair rationing more conscientiously than they have to date’ [emphasis added]. And they go on to stress their own support for ‘recognition of global rights to health and enforceable rights to health care in nation-states’.For my own part I recommend, perhaps less ambitiously, that across the globe we extract from Aristotle’s formal theory of justice a starting point that ethically requires us to focus on equality and always to treat others as equals and treat them equally unless there are moral justifications for not doing so. Where such justifications exist we should say what they are, explain the moral assumptions that justify them and, to the extent possible, seek the agreement of those can i buy lasix online affected.IntroductionIt did not occur to the Governor that there might be more than one definition of what is good … It did not occur to him that while the courts were writing one definition of goodness in the law books, fires were writing quite another one on the face of the land.

(Leopold, ‘Good Oak’1, pp 10–11)As I wrote the abstract that would become this essay, wildfires were spreading across Australia’s east coast. By the time I was invited to write the essay, back-to-back winter storms were flooding communities all around my home. The essay has been written in moments of respite between shifts during the can i buy lasix online hypertension medications lasix.

Every one of these events was described as ‘unprecedented’. Yet each is becoming increasingly likely, and that due to our interactions with our environment.Public discourse surrounding these events is dominated by questions of justice and fairness. How to balance competing imperatives of protecting individual lives against risk of spreading contagion can i buy lasix online.

How best to allocate scarce resources like intensive care beds or mechanical ventilators. The conceptual tools of clinical ethics can i buy lasix online are well tailored to these sorts of questions. The rights of the individual versus the community, issues of distributive justice—these are familiar to anyone with even a passing acquaintance with its canonical debates.What biomedical ethics has remained largely silent on is how we have been left to confront these decisions.

How human activity has eroded Earth’s life support systems to make the ‘unprecedented’ the new normal. A medical ethic fit for the Anthropocene—our (still tentative) geological epoch defined by human influence on natural systems—must can i buy lasix online be able not just to react to the consequences of our exploitation of the natural world, but reimagine our relationship with it.Those reimaginations already exist, if we know where to look for them. The ‘Land Ethic’ of the US conservationist Aldo Leopold offers one such vision.i Developed over decades of experience working in and teaching land management, the Land Ethic is most famously formulated in an essay of the same name published shortly before Leopold’s death fighting a wildfire on a neighbour’s farm.

It begins with a reinterpretation of the ethical relationship between can i buy lasix online humanity and the ‘land community’, the ecosystems we live within and depend upon. Moving us from ‘conqueror’ to ‘plain member and citizen’ of that community1 (p 204). Land ceases to be a resource to be exploited for human need once we view ourselves as part of, and only existing within, the land community.

Our moral evaluations shift consonantly:A can i buy lasix online thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.1 (pp 224–225)The justice of the Land Ethic questions many presuppositions of biomedical ethics. By valuing the community in itself—in can i buy lasix online a way irreducible to the welfare of its members—it steps away from the individualism axiomatic in contemporary bioethics.2 Viewing ourselves as citizens of the land community also extends the moral horizons of healthcare from a solely human focus, taking seriously the interests of the non-human members of that community.

Taking into account the ‘stability’ of the community requires intergenerational justice—that we consider those affected by our actions now, and their implications for future generations.3 The resulting vision of justice in healthcare—one that takes climate and environmental justice seriously—could offer health workers an ethic fit for the future, demonstrating ways in which practice must change to do justice to patients, public and planet—now and in years to come.Healthcare in the AnthropoceneSeemeth it a small thing unto you to have fed upon good pasture, but ye must tread down with your feet the residue of your pasture?. And to have drunk of the clear waters, but ye must foul the residue with your feet?. (Ezekiel 34:18, quoted in Leopold, ‘Conservation in the Southwest’4, p 94)The majority of the development of human societies worldwide—including all of recorded human history—has taken place within a single geological epoch, a can i buy lasix online roughly 11 600 yearlong period of relative warmth and climatic stability known as the Holocene.

That stability, however, can no longer be taken for granted. The epoch that has sustained most of human development is giving way to one shaped by the planetary consequences of that development—the Anthropocene.The Anthropocene is marked by accelerating degradation of the ecosystems that have sustained human societies. Human activity is already estimated to have raised global temperatures 1°C above preindustrial levels, and if emissions continue at current levels we are likely to reach 1.5°C between 2030 and 2052.5 The global rate of species extinction is orders of magnitude higher than the average over the past 10 million years.6 Ocean acidification, deforestation and disruption of nitrogen and phosphorus flows are likely at or beyond sustainable planetary boundaries.7Yet this period has also seen can i buy lasix online rapid (if uneven) improvements in human health, with improved life expectancy, falling child mortality and falling numbers of people living in extreme poverty.

The 2015 report of the Rockefeller Foundation-Lancet Commission on planetary health explained this dissonance in stark terms. €˜we have been mortgaging the health of future generations to realise economic and development gains in the present.’7In the instrumental rationality of modernity, nature has can i buy lasix online featured only as inexhaustible resource and infinite sink to fuel social and economic ends. But this disenchanted worldview can no longer hide from the implausibility of these assumptions.

It cannot resist what the philosopher Isabelle Stengers has called ‘the intrusion of Gaia’.8 The present lasix—made more likely by deforestation, land use change and biodiversity loss9—is just the most immediately salient of these intrusions. Anthropogenic environmental changes are increasing undernutrition, increasing range and transmissibility of many vectorborne and waterborne diseases like dengue fever and cholera, increasing can i buy lasix online frequency and severity of extreme weather events like heatwaves and wildfires, and driving population exposure to air pollution—which already accounts for over 7 million deaths annually.10These intrusions will shape healthcare in the Anthropocene. This is because health workers will have to deal with their consequences, and because modern industrialised healthcare as practised in most high-income countries—and considered aspirational elsewhere—was borne of the same worldview that has mortgaged the health of future generations.

The health sector in the USA is estimated to account for 8% of the country’s can i buy lasix online greenhouse gas footprint.11 Pharmaceutical production and waste causes more local environmental degradation, accumulating in water supplies with damaging effects for local flora and fauna.12 Public health has similarly embraced short-term gains with neglect of long-term consequences. Health messaging was instrumental to the development and popularisation of many disposable and single-use products, while a 1947 report funded by the Rockefeller Foundation (who would later fund the landmark 2015 Lancet report on planetary health) popularised the high-meat, high-dairy ‘American’ diet—dependent on fossil fuel-driven intensive agricultural practices—as the healthy ideal.13Healthcare fit for the Anthropocene requires a shift in perspectives that allows us to see and work with the intrusion of Gaia. But can dominant approaches in bioethics incorporate that shift?.

A perfect moral stormWe have built a beautiful piece of social machinery … which is coughing along on two cylinders because we have been too timid, and too anxious for quick success, to tell the farmer the true magnitude of his can i buy lasix online obligations. (Leopold, ‘The Ecological Conscience’4, p 341)At local, national and international scales, the lifestyles of the wealthiest pose an existential threat to the poorest and most marginalised in society. Our actions now are depriving future generations of the environmental prerequisites of good health can i buy lasix online and social flourishing.

If justice means, as Ranaan Gillon parses it, ‘the moral obligation to act on the basis of fair adjudication between competing claims’,14 then this state of affairs certainly seems unjust. However, the tools available for grappling with questions of justice in bioethics seem ill equipped to deal with these sorts of injustice.To illustrate this problem, consider how Gillon further fleshes out his description of justice. In terms of fair distribution of scarce resources, respect for people’s rights, and respect for morally acceptable laws can i buy lasix online.

The first of these—labelled distributive justice—concerns how fairly to allot finite resources among potential beneficiaries. Classic problems of distributive justice in healthcare concern a group of people at a particular time (usually patients), who could each benefit from a particular resource (historically, discussions have often focused on transplant organs. More recently, intensive can i buy lasix online care beds and ventilators have come to the fore).

But there are fewer of these resources than there are people with a need for them. Such discussions can i buy lasix online are not easy, but they are at least familiar—we know where to begin with them. We can consider each party’s need, their potential to benefit from the resource, any special rights or other claims they may have to it, and so forth.

The distribution of benefits and harms in the Anthropocene, however, does not comfortably fit this formalism. It is one thing to say that there is but one intensive care bed, from which Smith has a good chance of gaining another can i buy lasix online year of life, Jones a poor chance, and so offer it to Smith. Another entirely to say that production of the materials consumed in Smith’s care has contributed to the degradation of scarce water supplies on the other side of the globe, or that the unsustainable pattern of energy use will affect innumerable other future persons in poorly quantifiable ways through fuelling climate change.

The calculations of distributive justice are well suited to problems where there are a set pool of potential beneficiaries, and the can i buy lasix online use of the scarce resources available affects only those within that pool. But global environmental problems do not fit this pattern—the effects of our actions are spatially and temporally dispersed, so that large numbers of present and future people are affected in different ways.Nor can this problem be readily addressed by turning to Gillon’s second category of obligations of justice, those grounded in human rights. For while it might be plausible (if not entirely uncontroversial) to say that those communities whose water supplies are degraded by pharmaceutical production have a right to clean water, it is another thing entirely to say that Smith’s healthcare is directly violating that right.

It would not be true to say that, were it not for the resources used in caring for Smith, that the communities in question would face no threat to water security—indeed, they would likely make no can i buy lasix online appreciable difference. Similarly for the effects of Smith’s care on future generations facing accelerating environmental change.iiThe issue here is of fragmentation of agency. While it is not the case can i buy lasix online that Smith’s care is directly responsible for these environmental harms, the cumulative consequences of many such acts—and the ways in which these acts are embedded in particular systems of energy generation, waste management, international trade, and so on—are reliably producing these harms.

The injustice is structural, in Iris Marion Young’s terminology—arising from the ways in which social structures constrain individuals from pursuing certain courses of action, and enable them to follow others, with side effects that cumulatively produce devastating impacts.15Gillon describes the third component of justice as respect for morally acceptable laws. But there is little reason to believe that existing legal frameworks provide sufficient guidance to address these structural injustices. While the intricacies of global governance are well beyond what I can hope to address here, the stark fact remains that, despite the international commitment of the 2015 Paris Agreement to attempt to keep global temperature rise to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that present national commitments—even if these are substantially increased in coming years—will take us well beyond that target.5 Confronted by such institutional inadequacy, respect can i buy lasix online for the rule of law is inadequate to remedy injustice.The confluence of these particular features—dispersion of causes and effects, fragmentation of agency and institutional inadequacy—makes it difficult for us to reason ethically about the choices we have to make.

Stephen Gardiner calls this a ‘perfect moral storm’.16 Each of these factors individually would be difficult to address using the resources of contemporary biomedical ethics. Their convergence makes it seem insurmountable.This perfect storm was not, however, unpredictable. Van Rensselaer Potter, a professor of Oncology responsible for introducing the term ‘bioethics’ into Anglophone discourse, observed that since he coined the phrase, the study of bioethics had diverged from his original usage (governing all issues at the intersection of ethics and the biological sciences) to a narrow focus on the moral dilemmas arising in interactions can i buy lasix online between individuals in biomedical contexts.

Potter predicted that the short-term, individualistic and medicalised focus of this approach would result in a neglect of population-level and ecological-level issues affecting human and planetary health, with catastrophic consequences.17 His proposed solution was a new ‘global bioethics’, grounded in a new understanding of humanity’s position within planetary systems—one articulated by the Land Ethic.The Land EthicA land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such.iii (Leopold, ‘The Land Ethic’1, p 204)Developed throughout a career in forestry, conservation and can i buy lasix online wildlife management, the Land Ethic is less an attempt to provide a set of maxims for moral action, than to shift our perspectives of the moral landscape. In his working life, Aldo Leopold witnessed how actions intended to optimise short-term economic outcomes eroded the environments on which we depend—whether soil degradation arising from intensive farming and deforestation, or disruption of freshwater ecosystems by industrial dairy farming.

He also saw that contemporary morality remained silent on such actions, even when their consequences were to the collective detriment of all.Leopold argued that a series of ‘historical accidents’ left our morality particularly ill suited to handle these intrusions of Gaia—with a worldview that considered them ‘intrusions’, rather than the predictable response of our biotic community. These ‘accidents’ were can i buy lasix online. The unusual resilience of European ecological communities to anthropogenic interference (England survived an almost wholesale deforestation without consequent loss of ecosystem resilience, while similar changes elsewhere resulted in permanent environmental degradation).

And the can i buy lasix online legacy of European settler colonialism, meaning that an ethic arising in these particular conditions came to dominate global social arrangements4 (p 311). The first of these supported a worldview in which ‘Land … is … something to be tamed rather than something to be understood, loved, and lived with. Resources are still regarded as separate entities, indeed, as commodities, rather than as our cohabitants in the land community’4 (p 311).

The second enabled the marginalisation of other can i buy lasix online views. In this genealogy, Leopold anticipated the perfect moral storm discussed above. His intent with the Land Ethic was can i buy lasix online to navigate it.There are three key components of the Land Ethic that comprise the first three sections of Leopold’s final essay on the subject.

(1) the ‘community concept’ that allows communities as wholes to have intrinsic value. (2) the ‘ethical sequence’ that situates the value of such communities as extending, not replacing, values assigned to individuals. And (3) the ‘ecological conscience’ that views ethical action not in terms of following a particular code, but in developing appropriate moral perception.The community conceptThe most widely quoted passage of Leopold’s opus—already cited above, can i buy lasix online and frequently (mis)taken as a summary maxim of the ethic—states that:A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community.

It is wrong when it tends otherwise.1 (pp 224–225)This passage makes the primary object of our moral responsibilities ‘the biotic community’, a term Leopold uses interchangeably with the ‘land community’. Leopold’s community concept is notable in at least three respects. Its holism—an embrace can i buy lasix online of the moral significance of communities in a way that is not simply reducible to the significance of its individual members.

Its understanding of communities as temporally extended, placing importance on their ‘integrity’ and ‘stability’. And its rejection of anthropocentrism, affording humanity a place as ‘plain member and citizen’ of a broader land community.Individualism is can i buy lasix online so prevalent in biomedical ethics that it is scarcely argued for, instead forming part of the ‘background constellation of values’2 tacitly assumed within the field. We are used to evaluating the well-being of a community as a function of the well-being of its individual members—this is the rationale underlying quality-adjusted life year calculations endemic within health economics, and most discussions of distributive justice adopt some variation of this approach.

Holism instead proposes that this makes no more sense than evaluating a person’s well-being as an aggregate of the well-being of their individual organs. While we can sensibly talk can i buy lasix online about people’s hearts, livers or kidneys, their health is defined in terms of and constitutively dependent on the health of the person as a whole. Similarly, holism proposes, while individuals can be identified separately, it only makes sense to talk about them and their well-being in the context of the larger biotic community which supports and defines us.Holism helps us to negotiate the issues that confront individualistic accounts of collective well-being in Anthropocene health injustices.

In the previous section, we found in can i buy lasix online the environmental consequences of industrialised healthcare that it is difficult to identify which parties in particular are harmed, and how much each individual action contributes to those harms. But our intuition that the overall result is unfair or unjust is itself a holistic assessment of the overall outcome, not dependent on our calculation of the welfare of every party involved. Holism respects the intuition that says—no matter the individuals involved—a world where people now exploit ecological resources in a fashion that deprives people in the future of the prerequisites of survival, is worse than one where communities now and in the future live in a sustainable relationship with their environment.The second aspect of Leopold’s community concept is that the community is something that does not exist at a single time and place—it is defined in terms of its development through time.

Promoting the ‘integrity’ and ‘stability’ of the community requires that we not just consider its can i buy lasix online immediate interests, but how that will affect its long-term sustainability or resilience. We saw earlier the difficulties in trying to say just who is harmed and how when we approach harm to future generations individualistically. But from the perspective of the Land Ethic, when we exploit environmental resources in ways that will have predictable damaging results for future generations, the object of our harm is not just some purely notional future can i buy lasix online person.

It is a presently existing, temporally extended entity—the community of which they will be part.Lastly, Leopold’s community is quite consciously a biotic—not merely human—community. Leopold defines the land community as the open network of energy and mineral exchange that sustains all aspects of that network:Land… is not merely soil. It is can i buy lasix online a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants, and animals.

Food chains are the living channels which conduct energy upward. Death and decay return it to the soil. The circuit can i buy lasix online is not closed.

Some energy is dissipated in decay, some is added by absorption, some is stored in soils, peats, and forests, but it is a sustained circuit, like a slowly augmented revolving fund of life.4 (pp 268–269)While the components within this network may change, the land community as a whole remains stable when the overall complexity of the network is not disrupted—other components are able to adjust to these changes, or new ones arise to take their place.ivThe normative inference Leopold makes from his understanding of the land community is this. It makes no sense to single out individual entities within the community as being especially valuable or useful, without taking into account can i buy lasix online the whole community upon which they mutually depend. To do so is self-defeating.

By privileging the interests of a few members of the community, we ultimately undermine the prerequisites of their existence.The ethical sequenceThe Land Ethic’s holism is in fact its most frequently critiqued feature. Its emphasis on the value of the biotic community leads some to allege a subjugation of individual interests to the needs can i buy lasix online of the environment. This critique neglects how Leopold positions the Land Ethic in what he calls the ‘ethical sequence’.

This is the gradual extension of scope of ethical considerations, both in terms of the complexity of social interactions they cover (from interactions between two people, to the structure of progressively larger social groups), and in the kinds of person they acknowledge as worthy of moral consideration (as we resist, for example, classist, sexist or racist exclusions from personhood).This sequence serves less as a description of the history of morality, than a prescription for how we should understand the Land Ethic as adding to, rather than supplanting, our responsibilities to can i buy lasix online others. We do not argue that taking seriously health workers’ responsibilities for public health and health promotion supplants their duties to the patients they work with on a daily basis. Similarly, the Land Ethic implies ‘respect for [our] fellow members, and also respect for the community as such’1 (p 204).

At times, our responsibilities towards can i buy lasix online these different parties may come into tension. But balancing these responsibilities has always been part of the work of clinical ethics.The ecological conscienceIf the community concept gives a definition of the good, and the ethical sequence situates this definition within the existing moral landscape, neither offers an explicit decision procedure to guide right action. In arguing for the ‘ecological can i buy lasix online conscience’, Leopold explains his rationale for not attempting to articulate such a procedure.

In his career as conservationist, Leopold witnessed time and again laws nominally introduced in the name of environmental protection that did little to achieve their long-term goals, while exacerbating other environmental threats.v This is not surprising, given the ‘perfect moral storm’ of Anthropocene global health and environmental threats discussed above. The cumulative results of apparently innocent actions can be widespread and damaging.Leopold’s response to this problem is to advocate the cultivation of an ‘ecological conscience’. What is needed to promote a healthy human relationship with the land community is not for can i buy lasix online us to be told exactly how and how not to act in the face of environmental health threats, but rather to shift our view of the land from ‘a commodity belonging to us’ towards ‘a community to which we belong’1 (p viii).

To understand what the Land Ethic requires of us, therefore, we should learn more about the land community and our relationship with it, to develop our moral perception and extend its scope to embrace the non-human members of our community.Seen in this light, the Land Ethic shares much in common with virtue ethics, where right action is defined in terms of what the moral agent would do, rather than vice versa. But rather than the Eudaimonia of individual human flourishing proposed by Aristotle, the phronimos of the Land Ethic sees their telos coming from their position within the land community. While clinical virtue ethicists have traditionally taken the virtues of medical practice to be grounded in the interaction with individual patients, the realities of healthcare in can i buy lasix online the Anthropocene mean that limiting our moral perceptions in this way would ultimately be self-defeating—hurting those very patients we mean to serve (and many more besides).18 The virtuous clinician must adopt a view of the moral world that can focus on a person both as an individual, and simultaneously as member of the land community.

I will close by exploring how adopting that perspective might change our practice.Justice in the AnthropoceneFailing this, it seems to me we fail in the ultimate test of our vaunted superiority—the self-control of environment. We fall can i buy lasix online back into the biological category of the potato bug which exterminated the potato, and thereby exterminated itself. (Leopold, ‘The River of the Mother of God’4, p 127)I have articulated some of the challenges healthcare faces in the Anthropocene.

I have suggested that the tools presently available to clinical ethics may be inadequate to meet them. The Land Ethic invites can i buy lasix online us to reimagine our position in and relationship with the land community. I want to close by suggesting how the development of an ecological conscience might support a transition to more just healthcare.

I will not endeavour to give detailed prescriptions for action, given can i buy lasix online Leopold’s warnings about the limitations of such codifications. Rather, I will attempt to show how the cultivation of an ecological conscience might change our perception of what justice demands. Following the tradition of virtue ethics with which the Land Ethic holds much in common, this is best achieved by looking at models of virtuous action, and exploring what makes it virtuous.19Industrialised healthcare developed within a paradigm that saw the environment as inert resource and held that the scope of clinical ethics ranged only over the clinician’s interaction with their patients.

When we begin to see clinician can i buy lasix online and patient not as standing apart from the environment, but as ‘member and citizen of the land community’, their relationship with one another and with the world around them changes consonantly. The present lasix has only begun to make commonplace the idea that health workers do not simply treat infectious diseases, but interact with them in a range of ways, including as vector—and as a result our moral obligations in confronting them may extend beyond the immediate clinical encounter, to cover all the other ways we may contract or spread disease. But we may be responsible for disease outbreaks with conditions other than hypertension medications, and in ways beyond simply can i buy lasix online becoming infected.

The development of an ecological conscience would show how our practices of consumption may fuel deforestation that accelerates the emergence of novel pathogens, or support intensive animal rearing that drives antibiotic resistance.18The Land Ethic also challenges us not to abstract our work away from the places in which it takes place. General practitioner surgeries and hospitals are situated within social and land communities alike, shaping and shaped by them. These spaces can can i buy lasix online be used in ways that support or undermine those communities.

Surgeries can work to empower their communities to pursue more sustainable and healthy diets by doubling as food cooperatives, or providing resources and ‘social prescriptions’ for increased walking and cycling. Hospitals can use their extensive real estate to provide publicly accessible green and wild spaces within urban environments, and use their role as major nodes in transport infrastructure to change that infrastructure to support active travel alternatives.ivThe Land Ethic reminds us that a community (human or land) is not healthy if its flourishing cannot be sustainably maintained. An essential can i buy lasix online component of Anthropocene health justice is intergenerational justice.

Contemporary industrialised healthcare has an unsustainable ecological footprint. Continuing with such a model of care would serve only to mortgage the health of future generations for the sake of those living now can i buy lasix online. Ecologically conscious practice must take seriously the sorts of downstream, distributed consequences of activity that produce anthropogenic global health threats, and evaluate to what extent our most intensive healthcare practices truly serve to promote public and planetary health.

It is not enough for the clinician to assume that our resource usage is a necessary evil in the pursuit of best clinical outcomes, for it is already apparent that much of our environmental exploitation is of minimal or even negative long-term value. The work of the National Health Service (NHS) Sustainable Development Unit has seen a 10% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions in the NHS from 2007 to 2015 despite an 18% increase in clinical activity,20 while different models of care used in less industrialised nations manage to provide high-quality health outcomes in can i buy lasix online less resource-intensive fashion.21ConclusionOur present problem is one of attitudes and implements. We are remodelling the Alhambra with a steam-shovel.

We shall hardly relinquish the steam-shovel, which after all has many good points, but we are in need of gentler and more objective criteria for its successful use can i buy lasix online. (Leopold, ‘The Land Ethic’1, p 226)The moral challenges of the Anthropocene do not solely confront health workers. But the potentially catastrophic health effects of anthropogenic global environmental change, and the contribution of healthcare activity to driving these changes provide a specific and unique imperative for action from health workers.Yet it is hard to articulate this imperative in the language of contemporary clinical ethics, ill equipped for this intrusion of Gaia.

Justice in the Anthropocene requires us to be able to adopt a perspective from which these can i buy lasix online changes no longer appear as unexpected intrusions, but that acknowledges the land community as part of our moral community. The Land Ethic articulates an understanding of justice that is holistic, structural, intergenerational, and rejects anthropocentrism. This understanding seeks not to supplant, but to can i buy lasix online augment, our existing one.

It aims to do so by helping us to develop an ‘ecological conscience’, seeing ourselves as ‘plain member and citizen’ of the land community. The Land Ethic does not provide a step-by-step guide to just action. Nor does can i buy lasix online it definitively adjudicate on how to balance the interests of our patients, other populations now and in the future, and the planet.

It could, however, help us on the first step towards that change—showing how to cultivate the ‘internal change in our intellectual emphasis, loyalties, affections, and convictions’1 (pp 209–210) necessary to realise the virtues of just healthcare in the Anthropocene.AcknowledgmentsThis essay was written as a submission for the BMA Presidential Essay Prize. I am grateful to the organisers and judging panel for the opportunity..

What side effects may I notice from Lasix?

Side effects that you should report to your doctor or health care professional as soon as possible:

• blood in urine or stools
• dry mouth
• fever or chills
• hearing loss or ringing in the ears
• irregular heartbeat
• muscle pain or weakness, cramps
• skin rash
• stomach upset, pain, or nausea
• tingling or numbness in the hands or feet
• unusually weak or tired
• vomiting or diarrhea
• yellowing of the eyes or skin

Side effects that usually do not require medical attention (report to your doctor or health care professional if they continue or are bothersome):

• headache
• loss of appetite
• unusual bleeding or bruising

This list may not describe all possible side effects.

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Women’s Community Shelters CEO Annabelle Daniel has announced Stellar and Body+Soul editor-in-chief Sarrah Le lasix and gout flare Marquand as the basics first ever ambassador of Women’s Community Shelters.‘You have no worth. You’re nothing without me. If you leave, no one else will have you’.They are the words spoken to abused women all over the country, every day.Words that leave emotional scars, just like the physical violence one in three Australian women are subjected to.Like what you see? lasix and gout flare. Sign up to our bodyandsoul.com.au newsletter for more stories like this.Words that have financial impact, with victims stopped from working or studying – forced to be controlled in ways that make it feel all but impossible to leave.But that’s where the conversation around domestic violence is shifting, says News Corp’s Sarrah Le Marquand, who has just been named the first ambassador for Women’s Community Shelters, a charity that provides safe crisis accommodation shelters for women and children experiencing homelessness or domestic and family violence.“The conversation has shifted from ‘why did she stay?.

€™ to ‘how can we help her get out lasix and gout flare of this situation?. ,” said Le Marquand, editor-in-chief of Stellar, Body+Soul and The Binge Guide magazines.The mother of two started volunteering for Women’s Community Shelters five years ago, touring accommodation in Sydney's Hills District where she grew up and packing Christmas hampers with her young sons – who she wants to grow up as part of the solution to the growing problem.“The Women’s Community Shelters work is so fundamental at so many levels, from engaging the local community at a grassroots level but also in high schools with their ‘Walk the Talk’ initiative where some students in Years 10 and 11 will work with their local community shelter,” she said.“I’ve met some of these teenagers and the work they do is so inspiring – and for them it’s a real eye opener and gives them an insight into the issue, but what’s also so powerful is that young teenage men realise they can be part of the solution.“I love that we are able to work with local communities, in particular at high school because we know the potential there to change hearts and minds, and that grows to be a lifelong altering experience – and that’s how we will ultimately get to a point where we are building a society that’s free of domestic and family violence.”She said while so many Australians felt powerless to help, organisations like WCS were fundamental places to start. Currently opening their eighth and ninth shelters, this time in south west Sydney, the organisation’s chief executive Annabelle Daniel said virtually all victims had reported that the abuse and the control had worsened during the lasix.And with one in two women seeking a bed in a crisis shelter turned away every night due to a lack of space, she said more had to be done.“I would like to expand our shelter network further because every time we have opened a shelter it has been full within a matter of days,” she said.“We’ve had women attempting to put themselves on waiting lists before we’ve even opened because they want to know there is a safe place to go and somewhere they can receive support before they even make the decision to lasix and gout flare leave.“It’s one thing to say ‘why doesn’t she leave’, but the question is – ‘where will she go?. €™â€œHaving a beautiful and safe environment is actually necessary to help people move on and heal in their journey, and I am convinced that we can change Australia if we work community by community.”Women’s Community Shelters receives minimal government funding and the head office hub is solely funded by philanthropy.

To donate, visit here.The tragedy Sophie lasix and gout flare Delezio endured as a child made national news. Now, in a monthly interview series with Body+Soul, she sits down with fellow survivors.Lauren Huxley was just 18 when a man broke into her Sydney home and brutally attacked her in 2005. She was beaten so badly that doctors gave her a 5 per cent chance of survival. She remained on life support for 23 days.Lauren’s road to recovery lasix and gout flare was long and extensive – she endured nine major surgeries and had to learn how to walk, talk and eat again.Ultimately, her mind would wipe the horrific event entirely from her memory – and she now describes feeling almost as if the incident happened to someone else, or occurred within a dream she can’t recollect.Like what you see?.

Sign up to our bodyandsoul.com.au newsletter for more stories like this.As survivors of physical trauma, it’s a feeling we both have in common. I first met Lauren several years ago and was blown away by her lasix and gout flare strength, courage and resilience. Speaking to her, I quickly realised you don’t have to have the same disability or history to have experienced the same pain.Today, Lauren is living life to the full – never questioning why this happened or letting negativity take over.Because of her memory loss, her sister Simone assisted with answering some of the questions in our interview.At the request of Lauren and her family, the attacker’s name will not be included.What was your recovery process like?. Lauren.

I had to take it slow and not push myself. I never thought “Why me?. € There was no point. I kept positive for the sake of myself and my family.Simone.

When she was first learning how to walk again, they put her on a board and tilted her to get her blood pressure used to being upright. I remember the colour drained from her face. Then they got her on this big walker and it was so hard to watch – she was screaming, like she was in pain, but it was actually more to do with her brain trying to retrain itself to do these simple tasks. Later on, we would be worried about whatever surgery she was about to have, but she’d just say, “Don’t worry about me, I’ll be right!.

€What have been some of the challenges?. Lauren. I definitely had low points in the early stages. The hardest was watching my hair grow back – it was so short and grew back so slowly.

I have a bald spot where [the attacker] pulled my hair out and it’s never really healed. Going through five years of operations and rehabilitation, I was just focusing on getting better, so I missed out on a lot.I lost quite a few years of my life – I’m 34 but feel like I’m 29. My friends are at different stages now. Some never really understood or they stayed around for the wrong reasons, wanting the spotlight but not being there for me once it was gone.

I didn’t need that in my life.How can we affect change so that others don’t have to go through what you did?. Simone. [We need] tougher sentences. A tougher criminal system.

The man who attacked my sister had 26 convictions already – he was on bail and parole, and then committed this crime. He should never have been out. If he was in jail this never would have happened. How many others are like him?.

He qualifies for parole in eight years, which is terrifying.Lauren. We need to educate kids from a young age – with programs about violence against men and women, starting at school. And the government needs to teach kids self-defence – people shouldn’t have to go out of their way to get that education.Sixteen years on, what have you learnt about yourself throughout this journey?. Lauren.

You never realise how strong you and your family can be until an experience really tests you. Family is everything. All their love and support they’ve given me over the years... I don’t know where I would be without them.Time really does heal.

I’m so happy and grateful to be alive – and I’ll never take things for granted again. I’m here for a reason. I survived..

Women’s Community Shelters CEO Annabelle Daniel has announced Stellar and Body+Soul editor-in-chief Sarrah Le Marquand as Read Full Article the first ever ambassador of Women’s Community Shelters.‘You can i buy lasix online have no worth. You’re nothing without me. If you leave, no one else will have you’.They are the words spoken to abused women all over the country, every day.Words that leave emotional scars, just like the physical can i buy lasix online violence one in three Australian women are subjected to.Like what you see?. Sign up to our bodyandsoul.com.au newsletter for more stories like this.Words that have financial impact, with victims stopped from working or studying – forced to be controlled in ways that make it feel all but impossible to leave.But that’s where the conversation around domestic violence is shifting, says News Corp’s Sarrah Le Marquand, who has just been named the first ambassador for Women’s Community Shelters, a charity that provides safe crisis accommodation shelters for women and children experiencing homelessness or domestic and family violence.“The conversation has shifted from ‘why did she stay?.

€™ to ‘how can can i buy lasix online we help her get out of this situation?. ,” said Le Marquand, editor-in-chief of Stellar, Body+Soul and The Binge Guide magazines.The mother of two started volunteering for Women’s Community Shelters five years ago, touring accommodation in Sydney's Hills District where she grew up and packing Christmas hampers with her young sons – who she wants to grow up as part of the solution to the growing problem.“The Women’s Community Shelters work is so fundamental at so many levels, from engaging the local community at a grassroots level but also in high schools with their ‘Walk the Talk’ initiative where some students in Years 10 and 11 will work with their local community shelter,” she said.“I’ve met some of these teenagers and the work they do is so inspiring – and for them it’s a real eye opener and gives them an insight into the issue, but what’s also so powerful is that young teenage men realise they can be part of the solution.“I love that we are able to work with local communities, in particular at high school because we know the potential there to change hearts and minds, and that grows to be a lifelong altering experience – and that’s how we will ultimately get to a point where we are building a society that’s free of domestic and family violence.”She said while so many Australians felt powerless to help, organisations like WCS were fundamental places to start. Currently opening their eighth and ninth shelters, this time in south west Sydney, the organisation’s chief executive Annabelle Daniel said virtually all victims had reported that the abuse and the control had worsened during the lasix.And with one in two women seeking a bed in a crisis shelter turned away every night due to a lack of space, she said more had to be done.“I would like to expand our shelter network further because every time we have opened a shelter it has been full within a matter of days,” she said.“We’ve had women attempting to put themselves on waiting lists before we’ve even opened because they want to know there is a safe can i buy lasix online place to go and somewhere they can receive support before they even make the decision to leave.“It’s one thing to say ‘why doesn’t she leave’, but the question is – ‘where will she go?. €™â€œHaving a beautiful and safe environment is actually necessary to help people move on and heal in their journey, and I am convinced that we can change Australia if we work community by community.”Women’s Community Shelters receives minimal government funding and the head office hub is solely funded by philanthropy.

To donate, visit here.The can i buy lasix online tragedy Sophie Delezio endured as a child made national news. Now, in a monthly interview series with Body+Soul, she sits down with fellow survivors.Lauren Huxley was just 18 when a man broke into her Sydney home and brutally attacked her in 2005. She was beaten so badly that doctors gave her a 5 per cent chance of survival. She remained on life support for 23 days.Lauren’s road to recovery was long and extensive – she endured nine major can i buy lasix online surgeries and had to learn how to walk, talk and eat again.Ultimately, her mind would wipe the horrific event entirely from her memory – and she now describes feeling almost as if the incident happened to someone else, or occurred within a dream she can’t recollect.Like what you see?.

Sign up to our bodyandsoul.com.au newsletter for more stories like this.As survivors of physical trauma, it’s a feeling we both have in common. I first can i buy lasix online met Lauren several years ago and was blown away by her strength, courage and resilience. Speaking to her, I quickly realised you don’t have to have the same disability or history to have experienced the same pain.Today, Lauren is living life to the full – never questioning why this happened or letting negativity take over.Because of her memory loss, her sister Simone assisted with answering some of the questions in our interview.At the request of Lauren and her family, the attacker’s name will not be included.What was your recovery process like?. Lauren.

I had to take it slow and not push myself. I never thought “Why me?. € There was no point. I kept positive for the sake of myself and my family.Simone.

When she was first learning how to walk again, they put her on a board and tilted her to get her blood pressure used to being upright. I remember the colour drained from her face. Then they got her on this big walker and it was so hard to watch – she was screaming, like she was in pain, but it was actually more to do with her brain trying to retrain itself to do these simple tasks. Later on, we would be worried about whatever surgery she was about to have, but she’d just say, “Don’t worry about me, I’ll be right!.

€What have been some of the challenges?. Lauren. I definitely had low points in the early stages. The hardest was watching my hair grow back – it was so short and grew back so slowly.

I have a bald spot where [the attacker] pulled my hair out and it’s never really healed. Going through five years of operations and rehabilitation, I was just focusing on getting better, so I missed out on a lot.I lost quite a few years of my life – I’m 34 but feel like I’m 29. My friends are at different stages now. Some never really understood or they stayed around for the wrong reasons, wanting the spotlight but not being there for me once it was gone.

I didn’t need that in my life.How can we affect change so that others don’t have to go through what you did?. Simone. [We need] tougher sentences. A tougher criminal system.

The man who attacked my sister had 26 convictions already – he was on bail and parole, and then committed this crime. He should never have been out. If he was in jail this never would have happened. How many others are like him?.

He qualifies for parole in eight years, which is terrifying.Lauren. We need to educate kids from a young age – with programs about violence against men and women, starting at school. And the government needs to teach kids self-defence – people shouldn’t have to go out of their way to get that education.Sixteen years on, what have you learnt about yourself throughout this journey?. Lauren.

You never realise how strong you and your family can be until an experience really tests you. Family is everything. All their love and support they’ve given me over the years... I don’t know where I would be without them.Time really does heal.

I’m so happy and grateful to be alive – and I’ll never take things for granted again. I’m here for a reason. I survived..

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August 28, lasix trade name 2020Contact. Office of CommunicationsPhone. 202-693-1999U.S. Department of Labor Issues Revised Final Beryllium StandardsFor Construction and Shipyards WASHINGTON, DC - The U.S. Department of Labor's Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) today published a final rule revising the beryllium standards for construction and shipyards.

The final rule includes changes designed to clarify the standards and simplify or improve compliance. These changes maintain protection for workers while ensuring that the standard is well understood and compliance is simple and straightforward. The final rule amends the following paragraphs in the beryllium standards for construction and shipyards. Definitions, Methods of Compliance, Respiratory Protection, Personal Protective Clothing and Equipment, Housekeeping, Hazard Communication, Medical Surveillance, and Recordkeeping. OSHA has removed the Hygiene Areas and Practices paragraph from the final standards because the necessary protections are provided by existing OSHA standards for sanitation.

The effective date of the revisions in this final rule is September 30, 2020. OSHA began enforcing the new permissible exposure limits in the 2017 beryllium standards for construction and shipyards in May 2018. OSHA will begin enforcing the remaining provisions of the standards on September 30, 2020. The final standard will affect approximately 12,000 workers employed in nearly 2,800 establishments in the construction and shipyard industries. The final standards are estimated to yield $2.5 million in total annualized cost savings to employers.

Under the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970, employers are responsible for providing safe and healthful workplaces for their employees. OSHA's role is to help ensure these conditions for America's working men and women by setting and enforcing standards, and providing training, education, and assistance. For more information, visit www.osha.gov. The mission of the Department of Labor is to foster, promote, and develop the welfare of the wage earners, job seekers, and retirees of the United States. Improve working conditions.

Advance opportunities for profitable employment. And assure work-related benefits and rights. # # # U.S. Department of Labor news materials are accessible at http://www.dol.gov. The Department's Reasonable Accommodation Resource Center converts departmental information and documents into alternative formats, which include Braille and large print.

For alternative format requests, please contact the Department at (202) 693-7828 (voice) or (800) 877-8339 (federal relay).August 27, 2020U.S. Department of Labor Announces ActionsTo Assist Americans Impacted By Hurricane Laura WASHINGTON, DC – The U.S. Department of Labor today announced actions it is taking to assist Americans in states affected by Hurricane Laura. In response to the anticipated needs of those living in states in the path of Hurricane Laura, the Department and its agencies are taking the following actions. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has actively engaged with the U.S.

Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Emergency Management Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, and other federal agencies and is prepared to provide assistance. The Wage and Hour Division (WHD) will be prioritizing all calls in the affected areas to continue to provide uninterrupted service to workers and employers. The Employment and Training Administration (ETA) is prepared to provide Disaster Dislocated Worker Grants to help affected states address workforce needs. The disbursement of funds will be determined as needs are assessed by state and local partners. ETA is also prepared to assist in administering Disaster Unemployment Assistance.

The Employee Benefits Security Administration (EBSA) will coordinate with other federal agencies, including the U.S. Department of Treasury, the IRS and the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. On the release of compliance guidance for employee benefit plans, and plan participants and beneficiaries in response to Hurricane Laura. General information on disaster relief under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) is available on EBSA's website at Disaster Relief Information for Employers and Advisers and Disaster Relief Information for Workers and Families, or by contacting EBSA online or by calling 1-866-444-3272. The Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) issued a Temporary Exemption from certain federal contracting requirements.

For a period of three months, from August 27, 2020, to November 27, 2020, new federal contracts to provide relief, clean-up or rebuilding efforts will be exempt from having to develop written affirmative action programs as required by Executive Order 11246. The Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) is responding to Hurricane Laura's impact on mines, and stands ready to respond more generally with specialized equipment and personnel. And The Veterans' Employment and Training Service (VETS) is working with its grantees to identify further flexibilities and additional funding needs for its programs. VETS staff is prepared to assist employers, members of the National Guard and Reserves and members of the National Disaster Medical System and Urban Search and Rescue who deploy in support of rescue and recovery operations. The Department will continue to monitor developments regarding Hurricane Laura and take additional actions as necessary.

For additional information, please visit the Department's Severe Storm and Flood Recovery Assistance webpage. The mission of the Department of Labor is to foster, promote and develop the welfare of the wage earners, job seekers and retirees of the United States. Improve working conditions. Advance opportunities for profitable employment. And assure work-related benefits and rights.

# # # Media Contact. Eric Holland, 202-693-4676, holland.eric.w@dol.gov Release Number. 20-1654-NAT U.S. Department of Labor news materials are accessible at http://www.dol.gov. The Department's Reasonable Accommodation Resource Center converts departmental information and documents into alternative formats, which include Braille and large print.

For alternative format requests, please contact the Department at (202) 693-7828 (voice) or (800) 877-8339 (federal relay)..

August 28, 2020Contact can i buy lasix online. Office of CommunicationsPhone. 202-693-1999U.S. Department of Labor Issues Revised Final Beryllium StandardsFor Construction and Shipyards WASHINGTON, DC - The U.S.

Department of Labor's Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) today published a final rule revising the beryllium standards for construction and shipyards. The final rule includes changes designed to clarify the standards and simplify or improve compliance. These changes maintain protection for workers while ensuring that the standard is well understood and compliance is simple and straightforward. The final rule amends the following paragraphs in the beryllium standards for construction and shipyards.

Definitions, Methods of Compliance, Respiratory Protection, Personal Protective Clothing and Equipment, Housekeeping, Hazard Communication, Medical Surveillance, and Recordkeeping. OSHA has removed the Hygiene Areas and Practices paragraph from the final standards because the necessary protections are provided by existing OSHA standards for sanitation. The effective date of the revisions in this final rule is September 30, 2020. OSHA began enforcing the new permissible exposure limits in the 2017 beryllium standards for construction and shipyards in May 2018.

OSHA will begin enforcing the remaining provisions of the standards on September 30, 2020. The final standard will affect approximately 12,000 workers employed in nearly 2,800 establishments in the construction and shipyard industries. The final standards are estimated to yield $2.5 million in total annualized cost savings to employers. Under the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970, employers are responsible for providing safe and healthful workplaces for their employees.

OSHA's role is to help ensure these conditions for America's working men and women by setting and enforcing standards, and providing training, education, and assistance. For more information, visit www.osha.gov. The mission of the Department of Labor is to foster, promote, and develop the welfare of the wage earners, job seekers, and retirees of the United States. Improve working conditions.

Advance opportunities for profitable employment. And assure work-related benefits and rights. # # # U.S. Department of Labor news materials are accessible at http://www.dol.gov.

The Department's Reasonable Accommodation Resource Center converts departmental information and documents into alternative formats, which include Braille and large print. For alternative format requests, please contact the Department at (202) 693-7828 (voice) or (800) 877-8339 (federal relay).August 27, 2020U.S. Department of Labor Announces ActionsTo Assist Americans Impacted By Hurricane Laura WASHINGTON, DC – The U.S. Department of Labor today announced actions it is taking to assist Americans in states affected by Hurricane Laura.

In response to the anticipated needs of those living in states in the path of Hurricane Laura, the Department and its agencies are taking the following actions. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has actively engaged with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Emergency Management Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, and other federal agencies and is prepared to provide assistance. The Wage and Hour Division (WHD) will be prioritizing all calls in the affected areas to continue to provide uninterrupted service to workers and employers.

The Employment and Training Administration (ETA) is prepared to provide Disaster Dislocated Worker Grants to help affected states address workforce needs. The disbursement of funds will be determined as needs are assessed by state and local partners. ETA is also prepared to assist in administering Disaster Unemployment Assistance. The Employee Benefits Security Administration (EBSA) will coordinate with other federal agencies, including the U.S.

Department of Treasury, the IRS and the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. On the release of compliance guidance for employee benefit plans, and plan participants and beneficiaries in response to Hurricane Laura. General information on disaster relief under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) is available on EBSA's website at Disaster Relief Information for Employers and Advisers and Disaster Relief Information for Workers and Families, or by contacting EBSA online or by calling 1-866-444-3272. The Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) issued a Temporary Exemption from certain federal contracting requirements.

For a period of three months, from August 27, 2020, to November 27, 2020, new federal contracts to provide relief, clean-up or rebuilding efforts will be exempt from having to develop written affirmative action programs as required by Executive Order 11246. The Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) is responding to Hurricane Laura's impact on mines, and stands ready to respond more generally with specialized equipment and personnel. And The Veterans' Employment and Training Service (VETS) is working with its grantees to identify further flexibilities and additional funding needs for its programs. VETS staff is prepared to assist employers, members of the National Guard and Reserves and members of the National Disaster Medical System and Urban Search and Rescue who deploy in support of rescue and recovery operations.

The Department will continue to monitor developments regarding Hurricane Laura and take additional actions as necessary. For additional information, please visit the Department's Severe Storm and Flood Recovery Assistance webpage. The mission of the Department of Labor is to foster, promote and develop the welfare of the wage earners, job seekers and retirees of the United States. Improve working conditions.

Advance opportunities for profitable employment. And assure work-related benefits and rights. # # # Media Contact. Eric Holland, 202-693-4676, holland.eric.w@dol.gov Release Number.

20-1654-NAT U.S. Department of Labor news materials are accessible at http://www.dol.gov. The Department's Reasonable Accommodation Resource Center converts departmental information and documents into alternative formats, which include Braille and large print. For alternative format requests, please contact the Department at (202) 693-7828 (voice) or (800) 877-8339 (federal relay)..

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