Dan Brock and Dan Wikler (Harvard), both of whom have recommended in recent years a shift to what they term "population-based bioethics," have a new article out in Health Affairs entitled Ethical Challenges In Long-Term Funding For HIV/AIDS. Here is the Abstract:
The global response to the AIDS pandemic aims for universal access to treatment and for pursuing every possible avenue to prevention. Skeptics, doubting that the huge increases in current funding levels needed for universal treatment will ever happen, would scale back antiretroviral treatment in favor of more cost-effective preventive interventions. Economics, politics, and science figure in this debate. But there is also a question of ethical principle: Is there a moral imperative to emphasize treatment, even if emphasizing prevention would save more lives? The authors examine moral arguments that address this question, and come down on the side of saving the most lives via prevention.
There is a desperate need, IMO, for more of this kind of work, that analyzes the normative basis for the public health policies we do -- and do not -- pursue and implement. (Perhaps not coincidentally to my belief on this matter, such concerns are quickly becoming the center of my own research and interests).
Recommended.
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