The Patient As Victim And Vector

Bioethics emerged at a time when infectious diseases were not a major concern. Thus bioethics never had to develop a normative framework sensitive to situations of disease transmission. The Patient as Victim and Vector explores how traditional and new issues in clinical medicine, research, public health, and health policy might look different in infectious disease were treated as central. The authors argue that both practice and policy must recognize that a patient with a communicable infectious disease is not only a victim of that disease, but also a potential vector- someone who may transmit an illness that will sicken or kill others. Bioethics has failed to see one part of this duality, they document, and public health the other: that the patient is both victim and vector at one and the same time. The Patient as Victim and Vector is jointly written by four authors at the University of Utah with expertise in bioethics, health law, and both clinical practice and public health policy concerning infectious disease. Part I shows how the patient-centered ethic that was developed by bioethics- especially the concept of autonomy- needs to change in the context of public health, and Part II develops a normative theory for doing so. Part III examines traditional and new issues involving infectious disease: the ethics of quarantine and isolation, research, disease screening, rapid testing, antibiotic use, and immunization, in contexts like multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis, syphilis, hepatitis, HIV/AIDS, and HPV. Part IV, beginning with a controversial thought experiment, considers constraint in the control of infectious disease, include pandemics, and Part V 'thinks big' about the global scope of infectious disease and efforts to prevent, treat, or eradicate it. This volume should have a major impact in the fields of bioethics and public health ethics. It will also interest philosophers, lawyers, health law experts, physicians, and policy makers, as well as those concerned with global health.

'The Patient as Victim and Vector' is jointly written by four authors at the University of Utah with expertise in bioethics, health law, and both clinical practice and public health policy concerning infectious disease.

This book-first published a decade before the COVID-19 pandemic erupted-is the first authored volume on ethical issues in infectious disease, "monumental" for its competence and comprehensiveness. It is augmented here with a new Preface on COVID-19. The book develops an ethical framework for exploring contagious infectious disease, the patient-as-victim-and-vector view, grounded in the biological fact that a person with a communicable infectious disease is not only a victim of that disease, but at the same time also a potential vector. The patient may be both threatened, someone made ill or facing death, but also a threat, someone who may transmit an illness that will sicken or kill others. Clinical medicine has tended to see one part of this duality and public health the other; the victim-AND-vector view insists on both, at one and the same time. Against a background of methods from the long human history of contagious infectious disease-quarantine, isolation, cordon sanitaire, surveillance and contact tracing, testing by both archaic and modern methods, lockdown, and immunization-the victim-and-vector view spotlights ethical challenges for clinical medicine, research, public health, and health policy. These insights are probed in the new Preface on COVID-19 and are essential in our continuing struggle to address not only the current coronavirus pandemic, but the next, and the next after that.

'The Patient as Victim and Vector' is jointly written by four authors at the University of Utah with expertise in bioethics health law, and both clinical practice and public health policy concerning infectious disease.

The Blackwell Guide to Medical Ethics is a guide to the complex literature written on the increasingly dense topic of ethics in relation to the new technologies of medicine. Examines the key ethical issues and debates which have resulted from the rapid advances in biomedical technology Brings together the leading scholars from a wide range of disciplines, including philosophy, medicine, theology and law, to discuss these issues Tackles such topics as ending life, patient choice, selling body parts, resourcing and confidentiality Organized with a coherent structure that differentiates between the decisions of individuals and those of social policy.

Providing clinicians with all the vital information about tuberculosis, especially in the face of drug-resistant strains of the disease, this text covers which patient populations face an elevated risk of infection as well as which therapies are appropriate and how to correctly monitor ongoing treatment so that patients are cured.

This Open Access volume provides in-depth analysis of the wide range of ethical issues associated with drug-resistant infectious diseases. Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is widely recognized to be one of the greatest threats to global public health in coming decades; and it has thus become a major topic of discussion among leading bioethicists and scholars from related disciplines including economics, epidemiology, law, and political theory. Topics covered in this volume include responsible use of antimicrobials; control of multi-resistant hospital-acquired infections; privacy and data collection; antibiotic use in childhood and at the end of life; agricultural and veterinary sources of resistance; resistant HIV, tuberculosis, and malaria; mandatory treatment; and trade-offs between current and future generations. As the first book focused on ethical issues associated with drug resistance, it makes a timely contribution to debates regarding practice and policy that are of crucial importance to global public health in the 21st century.

Edited by four leading members of the new generation of medical andhealthcare ethicists working in the UK, respected worldwide fortheir work in medical ethics, Principles of Health CareEthics, Second Edition is a standard resource forstudents, professionals, and academics wishing to understandcurrent and future issues in healthcare ethics. With a distinguished international panel of contributors workingat the leading edge of academia, this volume presents acomprehensive guide to the field, with state of the artintroductions to the wide range of topics in modern healthcareethics, from consent to human rights, from utilitarianism tofeminism, from the doctor-patient relationship toxenotransplantation. This volume is the Second Edition of the highly successful workedited by Professor Raanan Gillon, Emeritus Professor of MedicalEthics at Imperial College London and former editor of the Journalof Medical Ethics, the leading journal in this field. Developments from the First Edition include: Thefocus on ‘Four Principles Method’ is relaxed to covermore different methods in health care ethics. More material on newmedical technologies is included, the coverage of issues on thedoctor/patient relationship is expanded, and material on ethics andpublic health is brought together into a new section.