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.

As this is the first book on the ethical issues raised by infectious diseases, it is a must read and a reference point for all the similar texts on the subject. This book is a canonical text about ethics and infectious diseases. * Ana Borovečki, Croation Medical Journal *
This book is one of those rare 'interdisciplinary' works that truly bridge the disciplines and make original contributions to them all. Whether you come to it from medicine, public health, ethics or law, you'll leave with a deeper understanding of the dilemmas that inhere in trying to control infectious diseases, as well as an original, internationally informed and ethically coherent approach to policymaking on new and old threats to our individual and collective health, from SARS and pandemic influenza to HPV and childhood infections."-Alexander M. Capron, Chair in Healthcare Law, Policy and Ethics, University of Southern California, and Former Director of Ethics, Trade, Human Rights and Health Law, World Health Organization
This well-written, innovative and multidisciplinary text makes a timely and significant contribution to our understanding of the public health challenges posed by the emergence of new and recrudescing multi-drug resistant infectious diseases. The novel concept of 'patient as victim and vector' opens new ways of thinking that will stimulate extensive scholarly debate-and hopefully some effective action-in dealing with such major threats to human life globally. This approach will supplement as yet inadequately operationalized paradigm shifts in thinking and acting that have been proposed to address infectious diseases, which could be considered the major challenge to human well-being and security in the 21st century."-Solomon R. Benatar, Emeritus Professor of Medicine, University of Cape Town, and Professor in Public Health Sciences, University of Toronto
For anyone interested in the subject or in teaching bioethics, this book is unique and essential. The ethical challenges in infectious diseases encompass a complex range of concerns, not only about the individual who suffers such an illness, but also about the impact of the individual's illness on the larger community. There are wonderful examples that illustrate the kind of dilemmas that force one to confront his or her own values with respect to the balance between the rights of individuals and the collective responsibility of health practitioners to find fair solutions to them."- Barry R. Bloom, Dean, Harvard School of Public Health
This new book, the collective effort of philosophers and physicians, well serves a both a statement to the field of bioethics and as a valuable text for students in medicine, public health, and bioethics. It is accessibly * and sometimes elegantlywritten, cogent and provocative... With care and unusual modesty, Margaret Battin and her colleagues turn to a range of topics central to the practice of public health.... To watch the authors probe and struggle with the moral dilemmas we all face is more than worth the price of admission.As reviewed in Bioethical Inquiry *

Margaret P. Battin, MFA, PhD, is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Adjunct Professor of Internal Medicine in the Program in Medical Ethics and Humanities at the University of Utah. The author of prize-winning short stories, she has authored, edited, or co-edited some twenty academic books, including The Least Worst Death. She has been named one of the "Mothers of Bioethics." Leslie P. Francis, PhD, JD, is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Distinguished Alfred C. Emery Professor of Law at the University of Utah. She writes on privacy, reproductive ethics, data use in public health, disability law, and federalism, and provides pro bono legal representation to people who are subjected to guardianship proceedings. Her books include Privacy: What Everyone Needs to Know. Jay A. Jacobson, MD, is Emeritus Professor, Division of Infectious Disease and founder of the Division of Medical Ethics and Humanities at the University of Utah School of Medicine. He is a Master of the American College of Physicians and Fellow, Infectious Diseases Society of America. He is a recipient of the American Medical Association Award for Leadership in Medical Ethics and Professionalism. Charles B. Smith, MD, is Emeritus Professor of Medicine at the University of Utah School of Medicine and previous Chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases. He has been Associate Dean at the University of Washington School of Medicine and Chief Medical Officer at the Seattle Veterans Administration Hospital. He has served as President of the Veterans Administration Association of Chiefs of Staff and is co-editor of Ethics and Infectious Disease.