Spring 2008 Virtual Visiting Scholars

Udo Schuklenk

Udo Schuklenk, Professor of Philosophy

Queen's University in Canada
http://www.udo-schuklenk.org/about.html


"Global Health Ethics"
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
7:00 - 8:30 p.m.
ATC 101 & West 216

This class will focus on various issues that are currently widely discusses internationally in the context of global health. Among these issue are ethical problems associated with infectious diseases control. HIV/AIDS has long been taken to be the paradigmatic cases of a life-threatening sexually transmitted illness. It is sufficiently prevalent in some countries in subsaharan Africa to threaten the very survival of such societies. Some of the ethical controversies relate to the questions of what are ethically acceptable standards of clinical care that are undertaken by Western researchers in those countries, and to the issue of whether or not mandatory HIV testing of pregnant women in high HIV prevalence areas is ethically called for. Class participants will have the opportunity to discuss some of these issues in greater depth by means of a case scenario drawn from real-world experiences.

The second half of this class is dedicated to another thorny issue in international health research, namely the issue of benefit sharing. What kind sof benefits are owed to people wo share their traditional knowledges with Western researchers and pharmaceutical companies. We will be analysing three brief
scenarios covering cases in Mexico, India and South Africa.

Host: Gregory Pasquarello