Ethical issues arise every time a plague and epidemic occur. There are numerous rules and ethics when dealing with people and how we treat them. We have viewed more and more cases of how we use ethics within the past ten years because of public health on the global level. They have cracked down on ethical protection ever since the Tuskegee syphilis study. The first main issue that goes with infectious disease is individual verse population. This is hard because when dealing with someone who is sick and contagious you want to hold their morals and be ethically right with how you treat them. But then there is the factor of the greater health of the population. We see this dilemma with isolation and quarantine. Isolation and quarantine to make sure diseases don’t spread and affect those around them. It allows for us to take a prevented action to a current situation. The downfall is when we remove someone from their normal life we remove their freedoms and that becomes unethical. We saw this with Typhoid Mary who was put on an island for a few years because she was a positive carrier of the typhoid disease. It was unethical to do because we took her civil rights and freedoms away and that is now unethical. The doctors believed they were doing the right thing when putting her there and because of it they didn’t believe to be in the wrong but numerous things have changed since that outbreak. If someone has to go in isolation and quarantine it is required they get paid leave from work. Then depending on their disease it is required to teach them a new job so that if the disease isn’t contagious one way they can still participate. Then the second issue we have seen is biases against certain populations. We saw this with African Americans during slavery and segregation then today we still see that with immigrants who come to America and are learning the way of society. Although they might come from poorer countries and communities it is unethical to treat them different when it comes to how we treat and cure them during times of distress. They are given the same rights and liberties and as a society we must abide by the rules to ensure they are treated right. The third and final ethical issue that has association is the experimental studies. For experimental studies there are a lot of new rules that have been instilled. First there has to be a choice on if people want to participate. They then must correct any problems that they made occur to the participants. You must not let participants die and cannot lie to them on what is going to happen. Then finally they must also be told about the true natures of the experiment and be made aware of all the risks upfront on what can happen.
We didn’t see this code of ethics during the Tuskegee Syphilis studies were rationalized with lies told to the men on what was going to happen to them. They believed they were going to get treatment for their problems. Then the doctors played that against them because majority of the men who were involved were very poor and had never personally had health care on a regular basis before, so to these men they believed they were getting treated and because of that they never truly had the opportunity to back out or question the authority of the doctors. The Tuskegee Syphilis study was unethical for numerous reasons that go against our ethical code today. First the doctor’s lied with what they said was going to happen. They told the men they were there to cure “bad blood”, then because of that men were never told the true natures of the study and weren’t aware that they actually weren’t being cured they were just seeing how the body was affected by syphilis. Another reason is like I said before in that the farmers were poor so it felt more like an obligation to participate with the study and because of that they didn’t actually have a choice on whether they wanted to participate or not. The Tuskegee Syphilis study was a turning point on how we treat certain populations. This was at the end of an era where segregation was strong in the south so they weren’t thought of as humans, which is ironic because one of the only things the study showed in that black men react the same way to syphilis as white men do.
This study is a fine example of the potential consequences on a specific group because it made a lot of African American people of the south distrust the government, hospitals and doctors. They were uneasy going in because they didn’t know if everything was truthful or not. For another instance I found from the NCBI government website would be woman in New Zealand who were treated unfairly in the untreated carcinoma in situ. So genders can also have a fear of what could happen because of who they are genetically.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26270295