[Epidemiology between ethics and politics]

Over the last two decades ethics in epidemiology has been the subject of a substantial number of conferences, books, articles, guidelines as well as training courses. The relevance of ethics for epidemiology does not make the ethical approach sufficient to exhaust the analysis of the relationship between epidemiology and society: on one side the ethical assessment of an epidemiological investigation is not self-sufficient but depends on the evaluation of the scientific worth of the study (a planned study involving humans is automatically unethical if scientifically unsound) and, on the other side, to be of practical value it needs expanding as to its policy implications. A few remarks on two issues, ethics committees and human reproductive cloning, support the general contention that translating knowledge into effective public health actions may be grounded in ethical considerations but necessitates a substantial development at political level.