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Health Security

Health Security

The Universities of Warwick and Monash have awarded Alliance seed funding for a collaboration between IERG and the Centre for Human Bioethics research (CHB), paying for two meetings identifying future lines of collaboration in security ethics and public health ethics.

These meetings will prepare the ground for long-term funded research collaboration between IERG and the CHB. The Principal Investigators are Tom Sorell and Michael Selgelid, who are co-appointed to both Universities.

The Centre for Human Bioethics (CHB) was established by Professor Peter Singer in 1980 as Australia’s first research centre devoted to bioethics, and it has long been recognised as one of the world’s leading centres of its kind. IERG and CHB have uniquely overlapping research expertise in security ethics and public health ethics.

Topics in this area include:

  • the ethical management of pandemics and pandemic risks
  • the conduct of vaccination programmes, especially where these meet public resistance; q
    uarantining protocols
  • public health surveillance, including possibly intrusive surveillance of behaviour with public health risks (e.g. AIDs, obesity)
  • bioterrorism
  • ethics of government co-ordinated emergency-response (e.g. flood, fire earthquake) where this has public health aspects
  • the ethics of medical transparency