Ebola, Quarantine, and the Scale of Ethics

The West African Ebola epidemic has raised fundamental questions about the ethical and practical use of quarantine measures during infectious disease events.

This article first reviews the idea of containment in response to disease and the means by which containment has been perceived. It then proposes that disaster medicine, whose focus is the individual, and public health in its focus on populations have related but distinct ethical imperatives. The means by which both were deployed in the West African Ebola epidemic are considered.

The argument is made that a narrow focus on the individual patient or community prevented an early recognition of the potential for disease expansion. In this case, a broad public health perspective was overshadowed by localized attention.

In the future, a public health perspective is a necessary and ethical priority and thus the use of isolation and containment in conjunction with the imperative to treat that is the focus of medical ethics. (Disaster Med Public Health Preparedness. 2016;10:654-661).