a Jesus College, Oxford University, Oxford, England. Correspondence to John Krebs (e-mail: [email protected]). doi:10.2471/BLT.08.052431 Whose responsibility is health? Is it purely a matter of individual choice or do governments have a role to play? What about others, such as businesses, employers and health professionals: do they also have responsibilities? Discussions of these issues ...

Ebola virus disease has ignited some of our worst fears in a globalized world. The disease spreads quickly, with high mortality, and is crossing borders. More than half of infected persons have died (1). The confirmed cases include 2 Americans who have become the focus of public attention because of their heroism and for the extraordinary measures taken to ensure that they received optimum medi...

First we give an overview of the historical development of public health. Then we present some public-health deontology codes and some ethical principles. We highlight difficulties in defining ethics for public health, with specific reference to three of them that concern: (i) the adaptability to public health of the classical principles of bioethics; (ii) the duty to respect and safeguard the ...

doi:10.2471/BLT.08.055954 While ethics in health care dates back at least to the times of Hippocrates, Sun Si Miao,1 and Ibn Sina (Avicenna),2 the field of “bioethics” did not emerge until after World War Two. The birth of bioethics was stimulated by a confluence of factors. First, the Nazis’ medical experiments on concentration camp prisoners heightened concerns about the vulnerability of huma...

The articles in this issue of the Bulletin describe some of the challenges posed by notions of intellectual property in areas as diverse as genetic testing, genomic epidemiology, pharmaceuticals and vaccines. The constructive practical solut tions suggested include royalty clearing houses, comprehensive research colt laboration policies, and modified DNA patenting regimes. All of the articles a...

Vaccines present a spectrum of unique ethical considerations compared with those associated with other medical interventions. Central to these differences are the role of vaccines in disease prevention rather than treatment, the concurrent interest of vaccination policy in improving the health of communities and individual people, and the focus on children in many vaccination programs. Formal d...