A Journey in Public Health Ethics

While medical ethics has a long history, and research ethics guidance emerged more formally in the 1960s and 1970s, frameworks for public health ethics began to appear in the 1990s. The author's thinking about public health ethics evolved from consideration of some of the ethics and policy questions surfacing regularly in the HIV/AIDS epidemic. This essay discusses some of the shared commitments of public health and ethics, as well as how one might apply an ethics lens to public health programs, both generally and in the contexts of public health preparedness and obesity prevention.