Ethics In Public Health

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Ethics in Public Health
In recent years Public Health has widened its ambit from its traditional role in control of communicable diseases and epidemiology to incorporate the social determinants of health like socio-economic and political factors.1,2,3
According to the definition from the Oxford Textbook of Public Health, “public health is the procedure whereby local, national and international resources are mobilized and committed in order to make sure that people are in a position to live healthily” 4
While the concepts of ethics in health exist from the times of Hippocrates, the history of the field of bioethics is comparatively shorter. Bioethics as a field started to evolve after World War two, when stories of experimentation on human …show more content…

Due to the varied nature of the field public health, ethics would include the following:
Availability, Accessibility, Affordability and responsiveness of services: The success of any healthcare system is assessed on the fact if healthcare services are available, if the populations can access the services, if the populations can afford the services available and if they are responsive to the needs of the people. The decision of allocation of funds to health programs is generally based on cost benefit analysis of input and output. In public health, small interventions that can improve the quality of life of a greater number are generally preferred over major interventions that benefit a few. Parameters such as DALY and QALY are used to evaluate which interventions can have the greatest benefit.
Primordial Prevention: Public health campaigns and government interventions designed to reduce or curb the unhealthy behaviors such as smoking and tobacco consumption have raised issues regarding the limits to which public health and governments can impose restrictions on personal freedom and choices to improve …show more content…

These principles need to be enforced more stringently when foreign research organizations invest in developing countries. For eg. The HPV vaccine trial conducted by Merck in India that led to the death of subjects and ultimately led to the suspension of all HPV vaccine trials in India in April 2010. These concerns also extend to the newly developing fields like ‘transplant tourism’ and ‘commercial surrogacy’ which expose populations living in poverty to health risks and

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