Title : Bioethics challenges in public health
Abstract:
Bioethics in public health involves balancing individual rights with collective well-being, often under resource constraints and urgent crises. Key challenges arise when promoting population health conflicts with personal autonomy or equity. Public health officials must navigate this by prioritizing proportionality, evidence, and transparency to justify any restrictions. To begin, public health measures like mandatory vaccinations or quarantines raise ethical tensions between community protection and individual consent. Historical cases, such as unethical experiments in Guatemala and Tuskegee, highlight risks of prioritizing research over participant welfare. Moreover, deciding who receives limited resources, such as ventilators during pandemics or vaccines in shortages, pits utilitarian goals against fairness principles. Strategies must avoid discrimination while maximizing overall benefit, as explored in case studies on public health planning. To continue, contact tracing and data collection for disease control challenge confidentiality rights. Ethical frameworks urge minimizing intrusion while ensuring data security to build public trust. Finally, low-resource settings face disparities in access to technologies or treatments, compounded by varying cultural norms. Bioethics calls for collaborative governance to prevent exploitation in research and ensure equitable outcomes from scientific advances. To summarize, mandatory interventions, resource allocation, privacy vs. surveillance and global equity issues represent some of the most important bioethics challenges in public health that are going to be further evaluated.
