Our nation often takes on a utilitarian approach when it comes to social issues. Generally, it’s our way to promote the greater good—we take the course of action that will benefit the most amount of people and ideally hinder the least. It’s statistically impossible to benefit everybody, at least in the way our society (and world) works, so logically it seems like the best solution to at least help everybody that we can when faced with a challenge or threat.
This is the impetus of infectious disease control. Infectious disease is a danger to the entire population, and ideally as few people as possible will be infected by illness. The goal of infectious disease control is to prevent epidemics, and if they break loose, to contain them before they become pandemics. It’s important to stop disease from spreading because obviously we want people to live being physically healthy as well as free from hysteria, but every so often we have incidents like the Black Plague, and more recently SARS and swine flu.
Common forms of infectious disease control that come to mind are vaccination and quarantine. Vaccination prevents people from developing illness in the first place. But say that the disease has evolved so that our treatments no longer protect against them and new treatments must be developed. In the meantime more and more people become infected and one way to stop it from spreading is to confine those who have the disease so that they can’t transmit it to others.
If we can contain everyone who’s already been infected and we successfully stop the epidemic, it’s a job well done and we’ve saved the majority of the population. But what about the people who are left in quarantine? If we don’t have any known treatment for what they have, then they’re stuck with it and there’s really no hope for them if it’s a life threatening illness. Essentially they become like martyrs and we’re thankful to them, but we wouldn’t want to be them. They came into that position by chance—it could have been any of us, why them? But the fact is that they’re the ones who were “chosen” to be robbed of life. It seems a bit unfair, but there doesn’t seem to be any choice on our part. Should these people be allowed to live out their lives at the risk of the lives of others? The answer is most likely to be an uneasy “no.” Infectious disease control works on a global level, not an individual one. Again, we have to look to the greater good and unfortunately, someone will always get left behind.
