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Dr. Philip Nitschke considers himself the Elon Musk of assisted suicide—and his latest death machine, the Sarco, is his Tesla. Newsweek spoke with the 70-year-old doctor immediately after the state of Victoria in Australia, his home country, voted this week to legalize euthanasia. Many are billing this as the first law of this nature Down Under, though Nitschke performed his first assisted death in 1996, during a brief period of legality in the country’s Northern Territory. As a young medical school graduate, Nitschke found himself drawn to the world of euthanasia and the work of Dr. Jack Kevorkian, the most famous euthanasia proponent in the United States. Inspired by Kevorkian's death machine, Nitschke set out to create an updated version that he called “the Deliverance.” The machine was rudimentary, comprising only a laptop hooked to an IV system, but it worked. A computer program would confirm a patient's intent to die and then trigger a lethal injection of barbiturates. It successfully ended four lives before Australia repealed the bill that legalized euthanasia in 1997. Keep up with this story and more by subscribing now But ending legal euthanasia “didn’t stop people from coming to me saying that they wanted to die,” said Nitschke. “I’ve spent the last 20 years fighting for the legislation that just passed.” Nitschke has aided in hundreds of what he calls “rational suicides.” In 1997, he founded Exit International, a nonprofit that advocates for the legalization of euthanasia, and in 2006, he published the Peaceful Pill Handbook, which instructs on the most painless and efficient ways to commit suicide. The Sarco is Dr. Nitschke's latest invention Sarco All the while, Nitschke continued to innovate his death devices. He created an “exit bag,” a bizzaro breathing mask with carbon monoxide replacing oxygen. The bag was highly effective but not very appealing, Nitschke said, citing the “plastic bag factor”: People don’t want to leave the world in such an aesthetically displeasing way. His latest machine, the Sarco, is the answer to that problem. The Sarco is sleek—and, Nitschke stresses, luxurious. It resembles a spaceship and is intended to convince its user that he or she is journeying to the great beyond. Its base contains canisters of liquid nitrogen and a removable capsule compartment that can be repurposed as a casket. The whole operation will be open-source and could theoretically be 3-D-printed anywhere in the world. It is, in short, the Model S of death machines. This suicide machine can kill its user in a matter of minutes. Sarco Here’s how it works: Potential users fill out an online test of mental fitness, and if they pass, they receive an access code that works for 24 hours. After the code is entered and an additional confirmation is given, the Sarco capsule will fill up with liquid nitrogen to bring the oxygen level down to about 5 percent. Within one minute the user passes out, and a few minutes later, death comes. Nitschke vowed that a Sarco death was relatively painless—there is no asphyxiation and the user breathes easily, he said, comparing it to an airplane cabin depressurizing. The model is scheduled to become widely available next year, and Nitschke was already in talks with some suicide clinics in Switzerland to license the machine. Fighting to dieIn the past 20 years, the right to physician-assisted suicide has been legalized in Washington, California, Vermont, Oregon and a several European countries. Nitschke believes the change in attitude stemmed from the aging Baby Boomer generation. “I’ve seen a marked difference between generations,” he said. “Boomers want to be in control of their own deaths. They don’t like the idea of someone patting them on the head and telling them what to do.” Dr. Philip Nitschke poses with a pair of needles. Reuters But each state and country has its own nuanced set of rules around medical aid in dying, while Nitschke believes the right to die is a human right, not a medical or legal privilege. No one should be subject to rules about whether or not a person is sick enough to choose to die, he said. It is the “right of a rational adult to have a peaceful death," he said. "Every person over the age of 70 should be able to die.” Of course, not everyone agrees with Nitschke. “I think it’s bad medicine, ethics, and bad public policy,” Dr. Daniel Sulmasy, a Georgetown professor of biomedical ethics, told Newsweek. “It converts killing into a form of healing and doesn’t acknowledge that we can now do more for symptoms through palliative than ever before.” Palliative care focuses on improving the quality of lives for people fighting deadly illnesses, rather than ending those lives. Sulmasy believes assisted suicide violates the bedrock of all ethical thinking, which is that people have value simply by being human beings. He argued that assisted suicide sent a message to disabled and dying people that society believed they should choose death if they became too much of a burden. He worried about the contagious effect suicide often has, pointing to the rash of suicides that occurred after Derek Humphry published Final Exit, a book that detailed aspects of planning and carrying out suicide. After the book was published in 1991, the number of suicides by asphyxiation in New York City rose by 313 percent that year. Sulmasy also pointed out that in Holland, nearly 5 percent of all deaths are due to euthanasia or assisted suicide. Doctors can ethically help patients find the ultimate relief in their final days, ethically, through a process called the rule of double effect, Sulmasy said. The rule says that if a patient agrees to the risks, an attending physician is allowed to keep increasing the dosage of pain medication until pain is completely under control, which may mean administering enough to render the patient unconscious or kill them. Nitschke argued that palliative care wasn't for everybody. People in good health had approached him simply because they felt that they’d had a good life and were ready to go, he said. He believes they have just as much a right to death as anyone else. Now a septuagenarian himself, the death doctor is coming to terms with his own mortality. And his invention might be his solution. “I’ve thought about it a lot lately,” he said. “I am attracted to the idea of the Sarco, and if I find myself in a situation where I need to use, it I will.” Tags: Dual SIM M2M router, M2M gateway, IoT gateway, Industrial router, low-cost industrial router , low-cost cellular router |
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Nigeria, one of the world’s most oil-rich countries, has a history of catastrophic oil spills that have wreaked havoc on the environment and local communities. But a new study says that oil spills may have also claimed the lives of thousands of babies born to mothers who live in areas contaminated by such incidents. The study, published as a working paper by the CESifo group, found that if an oil spill occurred within 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) of the residence of a mother before she fell pregnant, the mother’s baby would be twice as likely to die. Oil spills that occurred while the mother was actually pregnant did not have an impact on child or neonatal mortality, according to the study. Keep up with this story and more by subscribing now Researchers found that even if the oil spill occurred five years before the mother conceived, it still resulted in the neonatal mortality rate doubling from 38 deaths per year to 76 deaths per year for every 1,000 live births. A fisherman shows oil slick on his palm in Brass, Bayelsa State, Nigeria, on December 2, 2013. Stringer/Reuters Given that there were almost 5.3 million live births in Nigeria in 2012 and that around 8.05 percent of these births took place within 10 kilometers of an oil spill, the authors estimated that oil spills could have killed around 16,000 infants within their first month of life in 2012. Roland Hodler, the study’s lead author, told the Guardian that the results constituted a “tragedy.” “Even four to five years prior to conception, an oil spill still matters. I think this should be seen as a first-world problem for something to be done,” said Hodler. Read more: How much revenue has Nigeria lost because of oil militants in 2016? Oil spills are a fairly common occurrence in the Niger Delta region, a huge area of swamplands in southern Nigeria. The Nigerian Oil Spill Monitor has recorded more than 11,500 since 2006—when a government agency was set up to detect and investigate oil spills—though a few hundred of these were mistaken reports. The spills have led to accusations from Nigerians that international oil companies are exploiting the country’s natural resources. Royal Dutch Shell paid out £55 million ($83.5 million) to some 15,600 farmers and fishermen from the Bodo community in 2015 after two massives oil spills in 2008. Spills have also been a factor in periods of militancy in the region, most recently led by the Niger Delta Avengers. Masked Niger Delta militants hold their guns as they arrive at their camp, in Okrika, Rivers State, Nigeria, on April 13, 2007. The Niger Delta has been the site of several insurgencies. LIONEL HEALING/AFP/Getty The CESifo study, which was published as a working paper, looked at the effect of oil spills on mortality rates for infants born in the nine oil-producing states of the Niger Delta—Abia, Akwa Ibom, Bayelsa, Cross River, Delta, Edo, Imo, Ondo and Rivers—to infants born elsewhere. It paired data from the Nigerian Oil Spill Monitor with results from a 2013 national demographic and health survey and, overall, included data of around 5,000 children born to 2,700 mothers in 130 clusters that were all located within 10 kilometers of an oil spill. The study compared mortality rates and health of siblings born before and after nearby oil spills. It found that the closer a child was born to the site of an oil spill, the higher the rate of neonatal mortality, and that oil spills prior to conception also resulted in increased wasting—i.e. low weight or stunted growth—among children. The study also cited other research that showed the health impacts of oil-related pollution on unborn and newborn infants. For example, newborn infants have not yet developed the blood-brain barrier—a selective membrane that separates blood circulating in the brain from other fluid circulating around the body—which protects the brain from toxic chemicals. Hodler told the Guardian he was unsure why oil spills did not have a pronounced effect on neonatal mortality if the spill occurred during the course of pregnancy. “Why we don’t find a stronger effect during the pregnancy is not entirely clear—maybe it is due to the cumulative contamination of crude oil in the water and soil, which increases over time. But that doesn’t explain the entire effect,” said Hodler. In 2016, the Nigerian government launched a $1 billion cleanup operation in Ogoniland, an area of the Niger Delta that has been stricken by widespread oil pollution in recent years. Shell only began a cleanup operation following the 2008 and 2009 spills in the Bodo community earlier in 2017. Nigeria has traditionally been Africa’s biggest oil producer, but the industry dipped below that of Angola in 2016 after a sustained period of militancy saw many oil pipelines attacked. The Niger Delta Avengers had agreed a ceasefire with the government in August 2016, but announced on Friday that it planned to resume attacks and warned that “every oil installation in our region will feel warmth of the wrath of the Niger Delta Avengers.” |