Most books about ethics and health focus on issues arising from individual patients and their relationships with doctors and other health professionals. More and more, however, ethical issues are challenges that face entire communities, not just individual patients. This book is an edited collection of readings that addresses these public health challenges. Many of the issues considered, such as policy for alcohol and other drugs, newly emergent epidemics, and violence prevention, are public health concerns beyond the purview of traditional bioethics. Others, such as access to health care, managed care, reproductive technologies, and genetic testing, are covered in bioethics texts, but here they are approached from the distinct viewpoint of public health. The book makes explicit the community perspective of public health, as well as the field's emphasis on prevention. It examines the conceptual issues raised by the public health perspective (i.e., what is meant by community, the common good, and individual autonomy) as well as the policies that can be developed when health problems are approached in population-based, preventive terms.

PART I: THE SCOPE OF PUBLIC HEALTH AS ETHICS

Introduction

1. The Population Perspective, Geoffrey Rose, Vincente Navarro, Nancy Krieger and Sally Zierler

PART II: PUBLIC HEALTH AS COMMUNITY PERSPECTIVE

2. Community, Dan Beauchamp, Michael Walzer and Jonathan Mann

3. Prevention and Its Limits, Dan Beauchamp, J.H. Renwick and Gerald Dworkin

PART III: MODERN CHALLENGES TO THE PUBLICS HEALTH

4. Alcohol, Tobacco, and Other Drugs, James F.Mosher, David H. Jernigan, Bonnie Steinbock, and L.H. Glantz

5. Injury and Violence, William Haddon, Jr., James A. Mercy, Mark L. Rosenberg, Kenneth E. Powell, Claire V. Broome, and William L. Roper and Mark Moore

6. AIDS and Other Newly Emergent Diseases, Chandler Burr, Ronald Bayer, Laurence Dupuis, Joshua Lederberg, and Paul R. Epstein

7. Justice and Health Care, Amy Gutmann, Larry Church ill, Bradford Gray, Phyllis Freeman and Anthony Robbins

PART IV: NEW TECHNOLOGY AND THE PUBLICS HEALTH

8. Reproductive Issues, Philip Reilly, Elizabeth Heitman, and Joel E. Cohen

9. Genetic Screening, Testing, and Therapy, Norman Fost, Abby Lippman and Julie Gage Palmer