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. 2012 Aug;102(8):1447-50.
doi: 10.2105/AJPH.2012.300661. Epub 2012 Jun 14.

Beyond bioethics: reckoning with the public health paradigm

Amy L Fairchild  1 , David Merritt Johns
Affiliations

Beyond bioethics: reckoning with the public health paradigm

Amy L Fairchild et al. Am J Public Health. 2012 Aug.

Abstract

In the wake of scandal over troubling research abuses, the 1970s witnessed the birth of a new system of ethical oversight. The bioethics framework, with its emphasis on autonomy, assumed a commanding role in debates regarding how to weigh the needs of society against the rights of individuals. Yet the history of resistance to oversight underscores that some domains of science hewed to a different paradigm of accountability--one that elevated the common good over individual rights. Federal officials have now proposed to dramatically limit the reach of ethical oversight. The Institute of Medicine has called for a rollback of the federal privacy rule. The changing emphasis makes it imperative to grapple with the history of the public interest paradigm.

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Comment in

  • Personal data and the public health paradigm.
    Petrini C. Petrini C. Am J Public Health. 2012 Nov;102(11):e6. doi: 10.2105/AJPH.2012.300991. Epub 2012 Sep 20. Am J Public Health. 2012. PMID: 22994279 Free PMC article. No abstract available.

References

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    1. Stuart Plattner, “Comment on IRB Regulation of Ethnographic Research,” American Ethnologist 33, no. 4 (2006): 526.

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