CDC-Tuskegee public health ethics fellowship pilot

In November 2007, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Tuskegee University (TU) initiated a 2-year fellowship pilot at CDC and TU to increase capacity to address ethical concerns in public health practice. The fellowship pilot is a competency-based program, with a curriculum that includes didactic and applied on-the-job experiences. A senior-level TU National Bioethics Center faculty member was selected as the fellow. He will provide an overview of his main activities to illustrate how collaboration between CDC and an academically oriented bioethics center can be mutually beneficial. The benefit to TU is development of knowledge in public health that can be applied to its work to address the health concerns of minority and vulnerable populations. The knowledge gained from the fellowship will be used at TU to develop a master's of public health program that will feature a track in public health ethics, and plans for enhancing partnerships with the local Macon County, Alabama community to develop a public health research agenda. The benefit to CDC has been the opportunity to have an in-house ethicist assist in applying the principles of ethical theory to an analysis of CDC's public health programs. The fellow will describe his work on addressing ethical challenges in using expedited partner therapy, a procedure to deliver antibiotics to the partner of a patient experiencing a sexually transmitted disease. This work includes development of an ethical framework that emphasizes social relationships rather than the patient-physician relationship emphasized in biomedical approaches to ethics.