ABSTRACT

This chapter explores the ethical significance of this omission of infectious disease, arguing that it contributed to an unfortunate separation between the early development of bioethics and the field of public health. The advent HIV/AIDS, we argue, did little to bridge the gap; what we're regarded as exceptional' features of HIV/AIDS truncated appreciation of the theoretical challenges infectious diseases poses more generally for public health and bioethics. Only with emergence of HIV/AIDS and then in the main focused only on HIV/AIDS did characteristic features of infectious diseases return to the fore for discussion, and even then in a limited way. The term bioethics' actually originated in discussions of ethics and the biosphere, but quickly came too applied to ethical issues in healthcare. This myopia reached to the deepest theoretical levels, where basic normative commitments such as autonomy, and indeed the relationship between clinical medicine and public health, understood simplistically, without appreciation of the moral significance of communicable infectious disease.