1.  Katrina Forces Harsh Questions About the Medical Ethics of Disaster

In August 2005, when Hurricane Katrina was just beginning to bear down on the city of New Orleans, the doctors at Memorial Medical Center, a respected community hospital southwest of the French Quarter, were forced to make an impossible ethical decision: choose to evacuate the sickest and most injured patients last or attend to everyone equally and risk the lives of healthier patients and staff.* The decisions that were made—and their eventual consequences—are the subject of an 18-page feature story in this week's New York Times Magazine. With dwindling resources and little assurance that rescue helicopters would arrive in time (if at all), doctors at Memorial Medical elected to perform triage—or in short, prioritize which patients would be saved first on a scale of one to three. This, however, isn't where the story ends. Faced with the reality of more than 100 patients dependant on life support, a small team of doctors led by surgeon Anna Pou allegedly began to inject fatal doses of morphine and midazolam to these patients. Thirteen days later, mortuary workers uncovered 45 decomposing bodies from the hospital, and soon after, Anna Pou was arrested on four charges of homicide. The case that followed raised a number of questions in the medical community about the ethics of disaster—and particularly whether health care workers should be immune from prosecution for the good-faith choices they make in an emergency situation. [A side note: according to the folks at Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab, this story has been generating controversy for its high production costs. Earlier this week, NYT Magazine editor Gerald Marzorati told reporters that the story cost about $400,000 to put together.]*Correction, Aug. 28, 2009: This summary originally misstated the year of Hurricane Katrina as 2006.

Read original story in The New York Times Magazine | Friday, Aug. 28, 2009