Doctors can help human trafficking victims: study
Bid to identify exploitation
NEW YORK, July 23, (RTRS): Healthcare professionals can play a role in addressing human trafficking and sexual exploitation, according to two new reports.
Doctors and researchers write in JAMA Pediatrics that it’s up to a collection of people and agencies to advance and strengthen US efforts to prevent, identify and respond to commercial sexual exploitation and sex trafficking of minors.
“Human trafficking is a significant worldwide dilemma,” Dr Aimee Grace said. “In the US, healthcare providers can do something about it.”
Grace, of Children’s National Health System in Washington, DC, is the lead author of one of the reports addressing the integration of lessons about human trafficking into medical education and training.
“We hope (addressing) human trafficking becomes more a part of the norm about what medical providers provide as part of their practice,” she said.
In another report, Dr Angela Diaz of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City and her co-authors write that the sexual exploitation and sex trafficking of minors are serious and frequently overlooked, misunderstood and unaddressed problems in the US.
Underreported
The frequency of sexual exploitation and sex trafficking is underreported, they add, because the activities occur behind closed doors.
A history of maltreatment, family violence and unstable housing as well as being a gay, bisexual or transgender youth are among the risk factors for sexual exploitation and sex trafficking, Diaz and her colleagues write.
“Although direct scientific data are sparse, there is little doubt that commercial sexual exploitation and sex trafficking of minors are associated with serious, often lifelong, and sometimes life-threatening consequences,” they write.
In their report, Grace and her coauthors write that healthcare professionals may be some of the few peo- ple to interact with sexual exploitation and sex trafficking victims. One study found about half of trafficking survivors had sought medical attention while being trafficked, they note.
Grace told Reuters Health that there are areas where sexual exploitation and sex trafficking can be addressed within the healthcare setting, for example when doctors ask questions about intimate partner violence and sexual abuse.
She also said there are a number of tools to educate doctors about those topics. “A lot of them have been met with success,” Grace said.
Medical schools, residency programs, health professional organizations and regulatory bodies can ensure that lessons about human trafficking become part of medical education, Grace and her co-authors write.
Healthcare professionals can also support research that will provide evidence for informing and updating those lessons, they add. Alcohol: Mutant worms generated at a lab at the University of Texas may provide a pathway to prevent people from becoming intoxicated after drinking alcohol, a study released on Wednesday said.
The research could lead to new drugs to help people going through alcohol withdrawal or even prevent them from feeling the effects of a night of hard drinking, the scientists who wrote the study said.
“This is the first example of altering a human alcohol target to prevent intoxication in an animal,” said coauthor Jon Pierce-Shimomura, an assistant professor in the university’s College of Natural Sciences.
Pharmaceutical applications could include a “James Bond drug” that would help a spy drink an opponent under the table and walk away without being shaken or stirred, according to Pierce-Shimomura.
The team found in worms a mutation on a channel for neurons, called the BK channel, that does not allow alcohol to have intoxicating effects, according to the findings published in The Journal of Neuroscience.