Learning about diseases, viral or otherwise, often leads to sentiments similar to these.
Chapter 16 in Medical Ethics focuses on the ethical issues in stopping the global spread of infectious diseases. This chapter focuses mostly on viruses, subcellular pathogenic agents that cause many infections in humans and are prone to mutation. One of the other courses that I am enrolled in this semester is on communicable disease control, so this chapter contained very familiar content. The non-ethical bits anyway. Except maybe that we've discussed several times in my diseases course how the continued global population growth will continue to contribute to emerging infections, epidemics, pandemics, etc. as people continue to live closer together and keep moving into spaces previously and naturally occupied by other animals. That is a moral/ethical issue. Anyways.
The main portion of this chapter is on HIV and the HIV/AIDS epidemic(s) that caused a major uproar in the 1980s and is still ongoing in many nations. The history of HIV, especially in America, is closely entwined with LGBT rights and activism, and the chapter reflects that. The ethical issues that the author discusses when it comes to HIV are homosexuality and HIV exceptionalism. The main issues around homosexuality and HIV are related to stigma and shame when it comes to viral spread and screening and whether or not certain measures were considered homophobic or discriminatory. This aligns with exceptionalism, in that many people believed contact tracing and treatment research were unnecessary because it was only a "gay disease" and heterosexuals were not at risk. It took public deaths and irrefutable evidence to convince people otherwise.
The author goes on to discuss various views on stopping the spread of HIV globally, but comes to the conclusion that the best strategy is in educational prevention. It takes religion, morality, and triage out of the argument, and allows people to be treated equally and shows that when given education and access to treatment options that the quality of life for people who have been exposed to HIV improves dramatically.
Similar arguments exist for other outbreaks and pandemics, including Zika, Ebola, and the current and ongoing SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. The influence of updated public health practices, medical research, epidemiological understanding, the internet, and social media have created a much improved environment to deal with future outbreaks. With all that has gone on in the past and how much we have learned, one would think that our ability to handle the current pandemic would be much better than it is.
Great points, I agree that there should be a higher emphasis on education to prevent the spread. I feel the only "ethical" issue surrounding education would be that some parent do not want their children exposed to sex education while in high school. I don't think this argument holds much water however because if we only taught what parents wanted in schools, there would be a lot of strange subjects within the schools today.
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