Back to Annual Meeting Page		American Public Health Association 133rd Annual Meeting & Exposition December 10-14, 2005 Philadelphia, PA

Abstract #119804

Sydney Halpern, PhD, Department of Sociology, University of Chicago, 1007 West Harrison Street, Room 4112, Chicago, IL 60607-7140, (312) 996-3297, shalpern@uic.edu

There have been a number of recent efforts to develop an ethics of public health that would help inform and guide the analysis of the issues presented in this paper. Typically those efforts recognize the highly divergent ethical traditions of medicine and public health. In clinical practice and research, concern for autonomy has been preeminent. Informing the contemporary moral world view was the basic belief that individuals should be required to be treated for their own good or subjected to research – no matter how important for the public good – without informed consent. Animating the practice of public health, however, has been a historical concern for the wellbeing of populations. The ethics of public health that is emerging attempts to reflect that orientation, providing a foundation for the affirmative duty to monitor health threats, intervene to promote the public good, engage in research activities, and promptly disseminate findings from such efforts to public health officials and other stakeholders. Just as bioethics required a full appreciation of the practice of medicine and its moral justifications, so too is it necessary to have a rich understanding of the history of public health practices if the engagement with an emergent ethics of public health is to provide a durable foundation for a discussion among public health officials, clinicians, patients, privacy advocates, and ethicists.

Learning Objectives:

• Discuss contemporary controversies regarding the use of personally identifiable data
• Discuss ethical and regulatory frameworks governing the use of personally identifiable data that does not clearly fall within the scope of human subjects research

Keywords: Surveillance, History

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

I wish to disclose that I have NO financial interests or other relationship with the manufactures of commercial products, suppliers of commercial services or commercial supporters.

Recorded presentation