Whilst the wise use of resources is an important political and ethical consideration, it can be applied in such an overly simplistic way that important medical interventions and programmes are excluded as funding priorities. The counterbalancing argument within the Justice Principle is that cases with serious impact Smoothened Agonist purchase and severe outcomes also

need special consideration. Treating like cases alike can be rephrased as treating unequal cases unequally. That is, different criteria might apply, or different weighting given within criteria, for unusual selleck inhibitor situations that do not fit typical scenarios. This may lead to prioritization for the most serious and urgent situations, rather than to the widest spread of health gains across a population. Submissions from the Access to Medicines Coalition (2007) to the Ministry of Health on the development of a medicine strategy for New Zealand provides a valuable discussion on this issue. The submission from the Access to Medicines Tariquidar in vitro Coalition to the Ministry of Health on the development of a medicine strategy for New Zealand. The core of the counterargument is that utilitarian analysis needs a certain level of sophistication, and it must incorporate social context and community values to be a useful tool for analysis and decision making. Without the additional dimension of social and community

values, a rather crude utilitarian analysis that takes a whole population approach might favour

widely distributed health gains for the maximum number of people. By contrast, a sophisticated utilitarian analysis might tend to favour those most at risk of severe consequences, with urgency of need influencing how priorities are set, thus providing special consideration in special circumstances. This approach is well established in emergency care. It is also reflected in New Zealand health policy, with priority given to the health needs of Maori and other population groups. It can arguably be an appropriate consideration for rare diseases that have fatal or severely disabling impacts. However, we note that neither the WHO nor the New Zealand screening criteria provide guidance on this point. Screening for later onset and untreatable Clostridium perfringens alpha toxin childhood diseases Late onset and untreatable conditions directly violate the third and fourth criteria outlined by Wilson and Jungner (1968), with neither readily identifiable symptoms nor adequate treatment options. While proposals to screen for such diseases might be readily rejected at first glance, there are valid reasons for giving them serious consideration in the newborn context. The potential negative aspects are the affront to autonomy and apparent lack of benefits for the baby in gaining knowledge that might appear to bring only harm, and the denial of ordinary life experiences unencumbered by the certainty of impending disease impacts.