Category: Uncategorized

Hillary Stemple reports: Florida Governor Charlie Crist  on Friday vetoed [veto letter text,PDF] a bill [HB 1143 materials] that would have required women seeking an abortion to undergo an ultrasound or listen to a detailed description of the fetus before the procedure would be performed. Read more on JURIST.

Matthew Heller writes: After nearly six years of litigation, an Idaho jury will now hear a high-stakes case that pits child protection laws against the right of a couple to decide whether their infant daughter should have a spinal tap test for meningitis. The long-awaited trial will focus on a critical five-hour period which began…

Swiss lawmakers yesterday took upon themselves to safeguard the citadel of the country’s secretive banking system as they rejected a deal in parliament to hand over 4,450 names of wealthy Americans who held secret offshore accounts with Swiss bank UBS. Switzerland’s lower house rejected a bill to approve the settlement arrived at between the governments…

A presentation by Ann Cavoukian, Ph.D., Information and Privacy Commissioner, Ontario, Canada at the MD Physician Services User Conference on Embedding Privacy into Health Information Technology, June 4. You can see the PowerPoint here. It contains links to helpful brochures as well as some case examples.

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has found Lampeter Medical Practice to be in breach of the Data Protection Act, after an unencrypted memory stick containing the personal details of 8,000 patients was reported lost to the privacy watchdog. In March 2010, a member of staff downloaded a database containing patient details in contravention of practice…

Eric Frazier reports: An HIV-positive Union County woman let a drug company take pictures of her for an HIV patients’ magazine, but was shocked to later find the pictures and details about her situation had been published on the Internet – without her permission, she says. The woman filed suit in federal court in Charlotte…