I explore the implications of the foundation metaphor for understanding the role of moral theories in ethics and bioethics and argue.

Preparing for and responding to public health emergencies involving medical countermeasures raise often complex legal challenges and questions among response stakeholders at the local, state, and federal levels. This includes concerns about emergency legal authorities, liability, emergency use of regulated medical products, and regulations that might enhance or hinder public health response goals. In this article, lawyers from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of the General Counsel , Centers for Disease Control and Prevention , and Food (...) and Drug Administration discuss federal legal tools that are critical to enhancing MCM legal preparedness for public health emergencies, with an emphasis on the legal mechanisms that can be used to facilitate the emergency use of countermeasures. Specifically, the authors describe the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act and Emergency Use Authorization authority, outlining the conditions under which these tools can be utilized and providing examples of how they have supported both pre-event and intra-event activities. (shrink)

Law can greatly facilitate responses to public health emergencies, including naturally-occurring infectious disease outbreaks and intentional or accidental exposures to chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear agents. At the federal level, the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, as the lead for federal public health and medical responses to public health emergencies and incidents, has a range of authorities to support federal, state, tribal, local, and territorial responses. For example, under the Public Health Service Act, the Secretary may (...) provide temporary assistance to States to meet health emergency needs or deploy medicine and supplies from the Strategic National Stockpile. The Secretary also may determine that a disease or disorder presents a public health emergency, which may be the first step in triggering other critical legal authorities for response.Since the 2001 anthrax attacks, one focus of public health preparedness has been on developing, distributing, and rapidly dispensing medical countermeasures for CBRN emergencies and pandemics. (shrink)

In an increasingly interconnected global community, severe disasters or disease outbreaks in one country or region may rapidly impact global health security. As seen during the responses to the earthquakes in Haiti and Japan, Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines, and the current Ebola outbreak in West Africa, local response capacities can be rapidly overwhelmed and international assistance may be necessary to support the affected region to respond and recover and to protect other countries from the spread of disease. For example, (...) President Obama stated on September 16, 2014, that “if the [Ebola] outbreak is not stopped now, we could be looking at hundreds of thousands of people infected, with profound political and economic and security implications for all of us…. [T]his…is not just a threat to regional security — it’s a potential threat to global security if these countries break down…. And that’s why…I directed my team to make this a national security priority.”. (shrink)