Abstract
At present questions are being asked world-wide about the risk of the AIDS epidemic. The discovery of an anti-HIV vaccine has become an urgent priority, but it also raises a number of sensitive questions. Ethical problems in this field are particularly delicate, since the perspectives of individual health and public health do not seem to coincide. Our research team conducted a review of more than 400 articles on the ethical problems raised by AIDS. We concentrated particularly on the ethical and legal issues raised by research on anti-HIV vaccine. These problems fall into three main categories:
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- therapeutic assays, which must be controlled by a strict agreement defined by international norms;
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- manufacture of the future vaccine, raising legal difficulties which must be faced and solved now;
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- distribution of the vaccine to the population, which should be conducted on a general basis, i.e. it should be offered to all individuals and not only to risk groups.
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Enel, P., Charrel, J., Larher, M.P. et al. Ethical problems raised by anti-HIV vaccination. Eur J Epidemiol 7, 147–153 (1991). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00237358
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00237358