Global Health Challenges and the Role of Law: the 2012 National Health Law Conference: May 4 & 5, 2012; Metropolitan Hotel; Toronto. For the final program and registration, go to: http://nhlc2012.ca/.

Legal scholars, lawyers, and human rights advocates are often prone to believe that global health and human rights issues can be best addressed through law and litigation.  But do they always make a positive difference to the disadvantaged or do they sometimes augment the inequities they are intended to remedy? This is the core theme that runs as a thread through the international Global Health Law Conference that is taking place in Toronto on May 4-5, 2012.  At this conference, leading Canadian and international scholars, policy-makers, practicing lawyers and health care professionals will explore how law can address and make progressive change to global health challenges including: access to care and essential medicines for the most vulnerable; regulating medical tourism; ensuring equitable access to high quality healthcare; addressing the spread of chronic diseases and obesity; access to medicines in a global free-trade environment; and the global politics of health care.

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Posted in Access to Medicines, Feature Post, IP
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Global Health Challenges and the Role of Law: the 2012 National Health Law Conference: May 4 & 5, 2012; Metropolitan Hotel; Toronto. For the final program and registration, go to: http://nhlc2012.ca/.

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Trudo Lemmens is Associate Professor at the Faculties of Law and Medicine of the University of Toronto, and a member of the Joint Centre for Bioethics and the Centre for Ethics.

Medical research is increasingly relying on biobanks, large repositories of human biological material and related health information. These can be best conceived as elaborate research infrastructures, which allow researchers, often brought together in international research consortia, to study in more detail the long-term interaction between genes, environment and life-style. Biobanks are an increasingly crucial research tool, but they also raise complex legal and governance issues, particularly related to privacy. A key challenge is the difficulty of adequately informing people who donate tissue samples and give access to personal data about the type of research that will be undertaken–often in the distant future–and what specific privacy risks are associated with it.

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Posted in Human Rights Issues, Privacy, Technology
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