Principles for Public Health Ethics

Abstract

"The last century has brought about a renaissance of medical ethics, transformed to bioethics due to a wider range of ethical challenges in medicine transcending the traditional physician-patient relationship. Ethical discussions of issues related to health – from the status of the embryo to access to the health care system up to questions of physician-assisted suicide – have since mainly been framed under the heading of “bioethics”. But hardly any ethical discussions concerning the public’s health have been led. In continental Europe, for example, little effort is being made to establish an explicit ethics framework for public health – although systematic ethical approaches for public health are needed as the immanent conflicts between the social good and individual rights are and become more and more obvious e.g. in the context of a threatening influenza pandemic caused by a new human influenza virus subtype."