Ethical issues associated with vector borne diseases

Overview

In February 2017, the Global Health Ethics Unit hosted a scoping meeting which seeked to lay the groundwork for a guidance document on the ethical issues raised by the management and control of VBDs. The aim of the meeting was to map out issues that should be considered in the development of a guidance document, the principles that should guide the public health response to VBDs, and identify candidate topics for discussion in the final guidance document. The scoping meeting included in-depth discussion of the following questions:

• What are the ethical issues specific to VBDs, and which issues are familiar from epidemic diseases broadly construed?
• What are similarities and differences amongst ethical issues raised by individual VBDs?
• Which safeguards should be implemented to manage and mitigate these ethical issues?
• Which ethical principles should guide surveillance, prevention, control, and epidemic response efforts?
• Do research studies on VBDs in general raise any particular ethical concerns? For example, what are the conditions under which human challenge studies and the involvement of humans in field research on the biology and transmission of VBDs are ethically sound?
• What are the ethical concerns surrounding the eradication of vectors? Is it ever permissible to eradicate vectors?

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