The threat of a pandemic which may weaken much of the population is one of the greatest threats from a health care stand point. In order to protect a population from a pandemic, health officials need to take various steps. Initially, development of new vaccinations should be updated as viruses like influenza have a fair rate of mutations which make certain strands immune to previous vaccinations. Secondly, an efficient allocation scheme needs to be devised in order to properly ensure that affected individuals are provided proper measures for controlling the persistence of the condition.
There are certain ethical conditions which need to be analyzed in order to determine who is eligible for these vaccinations in a situation where vaccinations need to be allocated based on certain factors. The considerations which are often used are factors such as age and health. This type of blind categorization leads to various obstacles. First of all, it clumps individuals in numbers. An individual’s age is a very small component of what makes up an individual. Therefore, having a vaccination allocation program strictly based on age may allocate vaccinations to individuals who may be young but are not in the condition to benefit from the vaccinations. Secondly, individuals who are very close to the age mark ranging from a few days to months will come into question as the core reason for denying care for these individuals would be based on a mere matter of a few days. Health may be a more suitable method of allocation as individuals who have the most potential to gain from the vaccinations would be given these measures. However, this too brings about certain ethical considerations. Firstly, basing factors on health basically isolates the individuals who are not considered in this category as not only are they subjected to their own particular condition but they are also being discriminated in a larger sense. Therefore using age and health, may offer easy measures of intervention, nonetheless, this type of blind clumping leads to the isolation and mistreatment of individuals who for whatever reason are not encompassed in the “will get vaccination” lot.
A pandemic outbreak will also bring various other ethical issues into question. An individual’s right to privacy may not be respected in order to protect the “greater good” of other individuals. A health care official in a crisis faces the challenge of determining the importance of treatment for other patient while considering his or her own protection from the infection. Although health care officials have an obligation to care for sick persons, an infection which leads to many dire consequences may hinder an official’s desire to work in an environment which threatens his or her own health.
Recognizing that finding a cure for all the diseases which exist today would be a nice solution, however, this would certainly not solve all the complexities of disease which will continue to exist despite of cures. There is likelihood that even if all the disease of today’s world may be cured, another disease or virus may very easily arise and devastate the population again. Although this “disease” can be one which weakens the individuals physically, socially or economically, the diagnosis and treatment needs to be customized in the context of cultural and social factors of the location. Medicine should perhaps be more focused on disease preparedness and prevention rather than eradication. Although one does not have a way of knowing what diseases or how these diseases will come about, massively increasing public health interventions in preventative measures will definitely help.
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