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Health Check: 04/05/2009

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04/05/2009

BBC World Service - Health Check, 04/05/2009

The ethics of epidemics, visual neglect and stroke and snakebite treatment

The ethical issues for health workers in an epidemic; visual neglect after stroke - why music might help; and why hasn’t snakebite treatment improved in the last 3 decades?

If thousands are confirmed with swine flu, difficult ethical decisions will be raised about who to quarantine and what sorts of risks medical staff should be required to face.  In the SARS or Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome outbreak of 2003 medical staff faced difficult choices between risks to their health and care of their patients. What has the SARS epidemic taught us about the ethics of epidemics? 

Imagine you’re standing by a busy road. Your eyes are working perfectly but for some reason your brain won’t register cars coming from the left.  Called visual neglect – the inability to experience one side of space is a common symptom after someone has a stroke. As Anna Lacey reports, this curious limbo between seeing and knowing might be helped by music. 

Lalit Kalra, Professor of stroke medicine at Kings College discusses why this music might improve the brains of people with visual neglect.

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