Patient as Victim and Vector New Edition

This book-first published a decade before the COVID-19 pandemic erupted-is the first authored volume on ethical issues in infectious disease monumental for its competence and comprehensiveness. It is augmented here with a new Preface on COVID-19. The book develops an ethical framework for exploring contagious infectious disease the patient-as-victim-and-vector view grounded in the biological fact that a person with a communicable infectious disease is not only a victim of that disease but at the same time also a potential vector. The patient may be both threatened someone made ill or facing death but also a threat someone who may transmit an illness that will sicken or kill others. Clinical medicine has tended to see one part of this duality and public health the other; the victim-AND-vector view insists on both at one and the same time.Against a background of methods from the long human history of contagious infectious disease-quarantine isolation cordon sanitaire surveillance and contact tracing testing by both archaic and modern methods lockdown and immunization-the victim-and-vector view spotlights ethical challenges for clinical medicine research public health and health policy. These insights are probed in the new Preface on COVID-19 and are essential in our continuing struggle to address not only the current coronavirus pandemic but the next and the next after that.