Friday, October 10, 2014

Responsibility for collateral ebola damage

I guess that as far as bioethics and Ebola goes, resistance is futile. As someone interested in bioethics, right now you apparently have three choices: ignore that the Ebola epidemic is happening, join the noisy crowd of disease control bioethicists clamouring for attention, or point out ethical issues that are neglected or lie on the margins of the mayhem. The first option seems irresponsible. The second option seems superfluous: how much of that do we need, really? The third option, on the other hand, might have something to it. So in that vein ...

Those infected by an infectious disease during an epidemic are the object of immediate concern. Those they expose to infection are an important, secondary concern. But there are further knock-on effects that may be less obvious than (say) the overall economic impact. The Ebola epidemic raising havoc with the older, chronic, HIV epidemic in West Africa. Reliable access to HIV treatment has always been a struggle, but now HIV-positive persons in places like Liberia need to travel to get their drugs. Since only some of those in rural areas have the time/money to do that, treatment interruption and its consequences (viral rebound, etc.) are inevitable. In this way, Ebola leads to death by HIV. But it is not just HIV. Ebola in these regions is compromising health systems that were very fragile to begin with, a reversal of hard-won achievements may be faced on many fronts: malaria, diarrhoea, maternal and child mortality.

So the ethics question: when international and local agencies are engaged to control Ebola in West Africa, should they concentrate on Ebola alone, or do they also have some responsibility to deal with the collateral damage that Ebola has caused?

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