Public Health and Bioethics: The Benefits of Collaboration

Public health professionals operate under the moral imperative to ensure and protect the public's health. The ethical foundations of public health practice have always been implicitly assumed, by both members of the profession and the public at large. However, until recently, the basic values that underlie public health decisions and the conflicts inherent in its practice have rarely been articulated.1 During the past 2 decades, the AIDS epidemic has caused the field to be more aware of the values at stake when individual rights and the public good come in conflict.2,3 Exploring these complex questions and discovering that there are other important value conflicts in public health have caused academic leaders and practitioners alike to call for more attention to the fundamental ethical underpinnings of the field. The Public Health Leadership Society has brought together professionals from local and state public health departments, schools of public health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the American Public Health Association (APHA) to develop a Public Health Code of Ethics. In November 2001, they presented a draft code at a “town meeting” at the APHA annual meeting. It is anticipated that a number of public health organizations will adopt the code.1 There are also efforts to develop more courses and curricular materials to educate students about public health ethics.4 While there have been some good preliminary works published,5–7 many important issues in public health ethics have not yet received the attention they require, and there is as yet no comprehensive body of work to provide the foundation necessary for the field.