Genetically modified (GM) crops are the most important agricultural commodities that can improve the yield of African smallholder farmers. The intricate circumstances surrounding the introduction of GM agriculture in Africa, however, underscore the importance of comprehending the moral conundrums, regulatory environments, and public sentiment that exist today. This review examines the current situation surrounding the use of GM crops in Africa, focusing on moral conundrums, regulatory frameworks, and public opinion. Only eleven of the fifty-four African countries currently cultivate GM crops due to the wide range of opinions resulting from the disparities in cultural, socioeconomic, and environmental factors. This review proposed that addressing public concerns, harmonizing regulations, and upholding ethical standards will improve the adoption of GM crops in Africa. This study offers ways to enhance the acceptability of GM crops for boosting nutrition and food security globally.

BACKGROUND: During the first wave of the new coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, the sudden increase in hospitalised patients put medical facilities in southern Switzerland under severe pressure. During this time, bachelor\'s degree programs in nursing, physiotherapy and occupational therapy were disrupted, and students in their second year were displaced. Students experienced the continuous reorganisation of their traineeship as healthcare facilities adapted to a climate of uncertainty.
OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study was to investigate the degree of moral distress and the ethical issues most often encountered by physiotherapy, nursing and occupational therapy students enrolled in a traineeship during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in southern Switzerland.
METHODS: The sample consisted of 102 participants, and the response rate was 81.6%.
METHODS: Based on a pragmatic approach, a mixed-method with a convergent design was adopted. Data were collected between 30 April 2020 and 14 May 2020, via a survey administered to all occupational therapy, physiotherapy and nursing students in their fourth semester.
METHODS: Given that no vulnerable persons were involved, the Ethics Committee of Southern Switzerland waived authorisation. However, all measures were put into place to protect participants by guaranteeing their anonymity and confidentiality.
CONCLUSIONS: The data analysis showed that the main source for moral distress was \'poor teamwork\' and that the moral issues encountered most often by students were related to the appropriateness of care and working conditions, with a clear reference to students\' own safety and that of their loved ones; the other concerns reported included the loss of learning opportunities and the perceived lack of technical knowledge and skills.
CONCLUSIONS: This survey offers a faithful overview of physiotherapy, nursing and occupational therapy students\' experience during the first pandemic wave. This study also identifies some key recommendations for healthcare professions\' education.

The animal model deals with the species other than the human, as it can imitate the disease progression, its\' diagnosis as well as a treatment similar to human. Discovery of a drug and/or component, equipment, their toxicological studies, dose, side effects are in vivo studied for future use in humans considering its\' ethical issues. Here lies the importance of the animal model for its enormous use in biomedical research. Animal models have many facets that mimic various disease conditions in humans like systemic autoimmune diseases, rheumatoid arthritis, epilepsy, Alzheimer\'s disease, cardiovascular diseases, Atherosclerosis, diabetes, etc., and many more. Besides, the model has tremendous importance in drug development, development of medical devices, tissue engineering, wound healing, and bone and cartilage regeneration studies, as a model in vascular surgeries as well as the model for vertebral disc regeneration surgery. Though, all the models have some advantages as well as challenges, but, present review has emphasized the importance of various small and large animal models in pharmaceutical drug development, transgenic animal models, models for medical device developments, studies for various human diseases, bone and cartilage regeneration model, diabetic and burn wound model as well as surgical models like vascular surgeries and surgeries for intervertebral disc degeneration considering all the ethical issues of that specific animal model. Despite, the process of using the animal model has facilitated researchers to carry out the researches that would have been impossible to accomplish in human considering the ethical prohibitions.

BACKGROUND: While non-invasive prenatal testing (NIPT) for fetal aneuploidy is commercially available in many countries, little is known about how obstetric professionals in non-Western populations perceive the clinical usefulness of NIPT in comparison with existing first-trimester combined screening (FTS) for Down syndrome (DS) or invasive prenatal diagnosis (IPD), or perceptions of their ethical concerns arising from the use of NIPT.
METHODS: A cross-sectional survey among 327 obstetric professionals (237 midwives, 90 obstetricians) in Hong Kong.
RESULTS: Compared to FTS, NIPT was believed to: provide more psychological benefits and enable earlier consideration of termination of pregnancy. Compared to IPD, NIPT was believed to: provide less psychological stress for high-risk women and more psychological assurance for low-risk women, and offer an advantage to detect chromosomal abnormalities earlier. Significant differences in perceived clinical usefulness were found by profession and healthcare sector: (1) obstetricians reported more certain views towards the usefulness of NIPT than midwives and (2) professionals in the public sector perceived less usefulness of NIPT than the private sector. Beliefs about earlier detection of DS using NIPT were associated with ethical concerns about increasing abortion. Participants believing that NIPT provided psychological assurance among low-risk women were less likely to be concerned about ethical issues relating to informed decision-making and pre-test consultation for NIPT.
CONCLUSIONS: Our findings suggest the need for political debate initially on how to ensure pregnant women accessing public services are informed about commercially available more advanced technology, but also on the potential implementation of NIPT within public services to improve access and equity to DS screening services.

Examining those risk and benefit perceptions utilised in the formation of attitudes and opinions about emerging technologies such as nanotechnology can be useful for both industry and policy makers involved in their development, implementation and regulation. A broad range of different socio-psychological and affective factors may influence consumer responses to different applications of nanotechnology, including ethical concerns. A useful approach to identifying relevant consumer concerns and innovation priorities is to develop predictive constructs which can be used to differentiate applications of nanotechnology in a way which is meaningful to consumers. This requires elicitation of attitudinal constructs from consumers, rather than measuring attitudes assumed to be important by the researcher. Psychological factors influencing societal responses to 15 applications of nanotechnology drawn from different application areas (e.g. medicine, agriculture and environment, food, military, sports, and cosmetics) were identified using repertory grid method in conjunction with generalised Procrustes analysis. The results suggested that people differentiate nanotechnology applications based on the extent to which they perceive them to be beneficial, useful, necessary and important. The benefits may be offset by perceived risks focusing on fear and ethical concerns. Compared to an earlier expert study on societal acceptance of nanotechnology, consumers emphasised ethical issues compared to experts but had less concern regarding potential physical contact with the product and time to market introduction. Consumers envisaged fewer issues with several applications compared to experts, in particular food applications.

BACKGROUND: Healthcare professionals encounter ethical dilemmas and concerns in their practice. More research is needed to understand these ethical problems and to know how to educate professionals to respond to them.
OBJECTIVE: To describe ethical dilemmas and concerns at work from the perspectives of Finnish and Dutch healthcare professionals studying at the master\'s level.
METHODS: Exploratory, qualitative study that used the text of student online discussions of ethical dilemmas at work as data.
METHODS: Participants\' online discussions were analyzed using inductive content analysis.
METHODS: The sample consisted of 49 students at master\'s level enrolled in professional ethics courses at universities in Finland and the Netherlands.
UNASSIGNED: Permission for conducting the study was granted from both universities of applied sciences. All students provided their informed consent for the use of their assignments as research data.
RESULTS: Participants described 51 problematic work situations. Among these, 16 were found to be ethical dilemmas, and the remaining were work issues with an ethical concern and did not meet criteria of a dilemma. The most common problems resulted from concerns about quality care, safety of healthcare professionals, patients\' rights, and working with too few staff and inadequate resources.
CONCLUSIONS: The results indicated that participants were concerned about providing quality of care and raised numerous questions about how to provide it in challenging situations. The results show that it was difficult for students to differentiate ethical dilemmas from other ethical work concerns.
CONCLUSIONS: Online discussions among healthcare providers give them an opportunity to relate ethical principles to real ethical dilemmas and problems in their work as well as to critically analyze ethical issues. We found that discussions with descriptions of ethical dilemmas and concerns by health professionals provide important information and recommendations not only for education and practice but also for health policy.

The perception of physician shortage in Canada is widespread. Absolute shortages and relative discrepancies, both specialty-wise and in urban-rural distribution, have been a daunting policy challenge. International Medical Graduates (IMGs) have been at the core of mitigating this problem, especially as long as shortage of physicians in rural areas is concerned. Considering such recruitment as historical reality is naïve annotation, but when it is recommended per se, then the indication of interest overweighs the intent of ethically justified solution. Such a recommendation has not only invited policy debate and disagreement, but has also raised serious ethical concerns. Canadian healthcare policy-makers were put into a series of twisting puzzles-recruiting IMGs in mitigating physician shortage was questioned by lack of vision for Canada\'s self-sufficiency. In-migration of IMGs was largely attributed to Canada\'s point-based physician-friendly immigration system without much emphasizing on IMGs\' home countries\' unfavorable factors and ignoring their basic human rights and choice of livelihood. While policy-makers\' excellence in integrating the already-migrated IMGs into the Canadian healthcare is cautiously appraised, its logical consequence in passively drawing more IMGs is loudly criticised. Even the passive recruitment of IMGs raised the ethical concern of source countries\' (which are often developing countries with already-compromised healthcare system) vulnerability. The current paper offers critical insights juxtaposing all these seemingly conflicting ideas and interests within the scope of national and transnational instruments.

We consider a design problem for a clinical trial with multiple treatment arms and time-to-event primary outcomes that are modeled using the Weibull family of distributions. The D-optimal design for the most precise estimation of model parameters is derived, along with compound optimal allocation designs that provide targeted efficiencies for various estimation problems and ethical considerations. The proposed optimal allocation designs are studied theoretically and are implemented using response-adaptive randomization for a clinical trial with censored Weibull outcomes. We compare the merits of our multiple-objective response-adaptive designs with traditional randomization designs and show that our designs are more flexible, realistic, generally more ethical, and frequently provide higher efficiencies for estimating different sets of parameters.