ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the policies underlying the use and distribution of effective treatments in the context of a pandemic medical emergency before such an emergency actually occurs. An infectious pandemic threat is always the result of the emergence of new pathogenic viruses. The most comprehensive guidance has come from the Influenza Pandemic Working Group at the University of Toronto Joint Center for Bioethics. A disease pandemic is in some ways similar to other large-scale natural disasters; it arises from causes that are in a limited sense foreseeable, but in no sense entirely preventable. Any government hoping to deal with flu pandemic needs to have a strategy founded on commonly held ethical values. The human reactions reveal the depth at which are really rooted the ethical principles that are meant to drive our conduct. Prophylactic ethical debate may be one way of actually producing that elusive, if essential, component of social cohesion.
