Abstract

Only decades ago infectious disease was thought about to become a “closed book,” thanks to developments in sanitation, immunization, and antibiotics, together with other scientific and public health milestones. Bioethics came into being during this period and, as documented in Chapter 4, essentially left considerations about communicable infectious disease out. The book argues throughout that this was a remarkably unfortunate lapse, given the intensified threats of infectious disease both in the developed world and especially as a matter of global health. The book develops what is called the “patient as victim and vector” or PVV view, the bedrock of this book, an augmentation of existing bioethics theory and ethics generally, as a way of dealing with the ethical issues that communicable infectious disease presents in both theory and practice. This is to see communicable infectious disease as _central_ in bioethics generally, not as a rare or peripheral phenomenon but as something basic to the human condition.