Ethical issues are difficult to maneuver in modern day society some of these ethical issues that concern infectious diseases include, individual vs. population, biases against certain populations with respect to quarantine, and experimental studies. Individual vs. population includes things like vaccines and isolation/quarantine, the issue lies with individual’s rights. People have a right to refuse vaccines and quarantine, but when individuals do it can have a very negative effect on society. One ethical issue is that, should we force people into quarantine or to get vaccines? Also, with respects to quarantine an ethical issue that we face in modern day society is that the majority tends to think less about putting a minority population into quarantine, while the majority would have more of an issue with putting some of the majority into a quarantine situation. Finally, doing research on individuals in developing countries can be difficult because informed consent must be given and many impoverished individuals may not truly understand which is why it is important that whenever a research study is performed in a less fortunate nation that its participants are fully aware of the situation, so they are not taken advantage of.

The Tuskegee study was a major humans rights violation and disgraced the medicinal research community at the time. In short, the Tuskegee study was a study conducted by the U.S. government using only black male individuals ,who had syphilis, from a poor community. One major ethical issue that occurred in this study is that the “participants” were essentially used as human guinea pigs to figure out what syphilis does to the body. The “participants” were told that they were being treated for syphilis, but they were completely lied to, which goes against informed consent. The individuals in the study were not given informed consent which is now required in all research studies. Even though what had happened was clearly terrible, researchers tried to rationalize it by saying it was for the good of the black community and in the end would help them more than it would hurt them. Also, researchers continued the study even though many thought it was wrong because they believed that telling the participants would just hurt them more. It is clear to see that every aspect of the Tuskegee study was completely unethical from the lack of informed consent to the general lack of human morality.

Performing unethical studies not only hurts the population its targeting at that time it hurts that population for the years to come. It hurts the targeted populations (be it racial or gender) for years to come because once a targeted population is betrayed by medical professionals they will harbor a sense of mistrust and hate for medical professionals for a long period of time after the study. If they don’t trust medical professionals they are less likely to go to the doctor’s and seek help for illnesses. This occurred in Alabama after the study occurred proving the point that unethical studies hurt targeted populations through future mistrust.

Help Received: articles provided in class and film viewed in class