The paper presents and briefly analyses some of the provisions of a Romanian legislative proposal which arrived at the Presidency for ratification twice, in slightly different forms, and which was rejected twice: the first time at the Presidency in October 2004, and the second at the Constitutional Court in July 2005. The proposal was finally dropped in February 2006. My intention here is to point

In this paper we argue that comprehensive and systematic parental education has the potential to equip young adults with the necessary information for the responsible exercise of their autonomy in choices about reproduction and parenting. Education can allow young adults to acquire largely accurate beliefs about reproduction and parenting and about the implications of their reproductive and parent

Vitamin D analogues are in clinical use for prevention and treatment of secondary hyperparathyroidism (HPT) in chronic renal failure. Despite recent advances there is a need for vitamin D derivatives with maintained parathyroid hormone suppressive activity and less hypercalcemic and hyperphosphatemic toxicity. Here we show coincident increased expression of the vitamin D activating enzyme 25-hydro

Some of the objections to life-extension stem from a concern with overpopulation. I will show that whether or not the overpopulation threat is realistic, arguments from overpopulation cannot ethically demand halting the quest for, nor access to, life-extension. The reason for this is that we have a right to life, which entitles us not to have meaningful life denied to us against our will and which

In this article I look at two hypothetical examples with the purpose of challenging some of the underlying intuitions that affect our views on immortality.

This paper is focused on the analysis of two documents (the Council of Europe's Bioethics Convention and the Additional Cloning Protocol) inasmuch as they refer to the relationship between human dignity and human genetic engineering. After presenting the stipulations of the abovementioned documents, I will review various proposed meanings of human dignity and will try to identify which of these se

The paper explores the ethics of post-menopausal motherhood by looking at the case of Adriana Iliescu, the oldest woman ever to have given birth (so far). To this end, I will approach the three most common objections brought against the mother and/or against the team of healthcare professionals who made it happen: the age of the mother, the fact that she is single, the appropriateness of her motiv

Background: Peripheral arterial disease (PAD) is a common atherosclerotic disease with severity ranging from asymptomatic to chronic limb threatening ischemia. The aim of the present cross-sectional study was to identify novel biomarkers associated with PAD. Patients and methods: Levels of 91 cardiovascular specific proteins in plasma samples were measured by the Proseek Multiplex CVD III96x96 pa

elwood is the main source of cooking and heating energy for households in rural sub-Saharan Africa. Unfortunately, most of these households use inefficient biomass cook stoves, leading to consumption of more fuel and exposure to indoor air pollutants and associate health problems which disproportionately affect women and children. However, adoption of cleaner biomass cook stoves has remained low w

The burden of cardiometabolic diseases is increasing worldwide. Early detection of high-risk individuals is essential for appropriate diagnosis, better treatment outcomes, quality of life and lower health related costs. Aims: The overall aim of this thesis is to investigate the possible associations between plasma proneurotensin (Pro-NT) and risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD), type 2 diabetes (T

This research report was prepared in the framework of the EU-funded project “Central Asian Law: Legal Cultures and Business Environments in Central Asia” (project number 870647 H2020 MSCA-RISE 2019-2023), which runs from 01/03/2020 through 28/02/2024. The project is coordinated by Lund University, and the project consortium includes European universities (University of Zurich, Charles University P

Several suggestions have been made as to why Sweden's approach to managing the COVID-19 pandemic came to rely on a strategy based on voluntary measures. Two of the most prominent explanations for why the country chose a different strategy than many other countries have focused on micro- and macro-level factors, explaining the strategy either in terms of the psychologies of prominent actors or by p

Guaranteeing reliable access to water and clean energy has been one of the most debated topics to promote sustainable development, which has made the Water–Energy Nexus (WEN) a relevant field of study. However, despite much development of the WEN, there are still many gaps to be addressed. One of these gaps is the understanding of temporal features. To address this, this study aimed to identify, c

We study left-invariant foliations F on semi-Riemannian Lie groups G generated by a subgroup K. We are interested in such foliations which are conformal and with minimal leaves of codimension two. We classify such foliations F when the subgroup K is one of the important groups SU(2), SL_2(R), SU(2)*SU(2), SU(2)*SL_2(R)$, SU(2)*SO(2), SL_2(R)*SO(2). This way we construct new multi-dimensional famil

OBJECTIVES: Develop and validate a WHO Standards-based online questionnaire to measure the quality of maternal and newborn care (QMNC) around the time of childbirth from the health workers' perspective.DESIGN: Mixed-methods study.SETTING: Six countries of the WHO European Region.PARTICIPANTS AND METHODS: The questionnaire is based on lessons learnt in previous studies, and was developed in three s