Treatment of Ebola Epidemic and the Associated Ethical Delima or What I Am Seeing Currently as Delima

Treatment of Ebola Epidemic and the associated ethical delima or what I am Seeing currently as delima

I had never heard of Ebola disease. But with the news coming every day I started reading about it and found that until current spread out, it was not consider a Western problem. Ebola seemed contained in the remote corners of Africa. It originated in West Africa and was thought of not as a problem for other countries. But As I believe, all of us should be in this together to fight with Ebola or any other kind of disease.

If we can shed our wrong believes regarding the Ebola, We will be able to see ethical considerations that should shape how we go forward. Fairness and reciprocity are just two out of many which I have found in current situation from the news and reading about the current outspread of Ebola (scientiasalon).

University of Toronto produced journal article on “Ethical considerations in preparedness planning for pandemic influenza” which considerably values “reciprocity” (University-of-Toronto). In such aftermaths we often fail to see ethical treatments of “healthcare workers”. They risk their lives for us and we owe them our lives too if they are harmed.

We often do not recognize or are not “recognizing” that all the health care and public health workers are at a greater risk in the Ebola epidemic because they are the one fighting upfront and many have spared their lived in doing so. Health care workers in Africa have limited equipment under circumstances in which it is very difficult for them to be safe but still they are not giving up, according to a recent Wall Street Journal article.

They are according to me following Ethical framework of “Maximising the amount of good in the world” which balances the benefits of an action against the risks and costs and promotes the common good to help everyone have a fair share of the benefits in society, a community or a family. We can rightfully take this framework ‘right’ to override the rights of individuals in order to bring about happiness in the wider community (Hall).

Another ethical framework which I suppose is applicable here is “leading a virtuous life”. How many of us live for others and how many of us think about moral “rightness” or “wrongness” of an action? An action can be described as right or wrong independently from any consequences of the action. It is not the consequences that make an action right or wrong, but the principle or motivation on which the action is based. Healthcare workers treat their life to be leading a meaningful and virtuous life and they consider it their moral duty to help others.

But as they are risking their lives we also must feel the importance of providing adequately for these workers and for workers in the next epidemics because they are the ones towards which we will be looking for help again and this just does not apply for Americans