One health research ethics

Emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases (EIDs) present major threats to public health, global security, and economic development. Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is the latest EID to demonstrate the devastation, suffering, and scale of death that an EID can cause. Pandemics involving emerging and re-emerging infectious agents and associated infectious diseases, climate change, urbanization, biodiversity loss and financial instability have been identified as the most critical global issues today (1). Close to three-quarters of today’s EIDs are known to be of zoonotic origin (where infectious agents spread to humans from domestic or wild animals), and their frequency and economic impact are on the ris

DISASTER CONSTRUCTION AND RECONSTRUCTION: LESSONS FROM COVID-19 FOR ETHICS, POLITICS AND LAW

This volume is the result of a longstanding cooperation between the editors and some of the contributors, which started in 2012, with their joint participation in the COST Action IS1201 Disaster Bioethics organized under the leadership of Dublin City University and Associate Professor Dónal O’Mathúna. Soon after, followed a joint workshop entitled “Disaster and Social Justice: Victims, Vulnerabilities and Resilience,” at the University of Copenhagen with the COST Action IS1201 on 27-28 February 2014 in Copenhagen, Denmark. The central topic of our shared discussion since then has been the controversial relation between social and ethical issues triggered by disasters, as well as bioethics as a theoretical and applied discipline. These joint efforts resulted in an inter-universities cooperation and the volume edited by D. O’Mathúna, V. Dranseika and B. Gordijn titled Disasters: Core Concepts and Ethical Theories. Ten years after our firsts scientific contacts concerning disaster issues, Veselin Mitrović and Naomi Zack initiated a joint conference “Social, Economic and Political Construction of COVID-19” organized by the Institute of Social Sciences (ISS) and Lehman College, CUNY in Belgrade, Serbia and New York, USA (virtual), in May 2023. 8 Preface As with all such volumes, they are the result of many people’s contributions and help. First of all, we would like to express our utmost gratitude to all contributors for putting in so much hard work to provide this volume with numerous excellent and thought-provoking chapters. We are grateful to the Ministry of Science, Technological Development and Innovations of the Republic of Serbia for the financial support in realizing this book. Furthermore, we would like to say a special “thank you” to Dragica Puljarević and Goran Bašić, as well as the rest of the ISS publishing team, for their tremendous support and patience with regard to putting this volume together. We are grateful to the president of the Scientific Council of the ISS Predrag Jovanović and the entire Council membership, who supported the publishing of this book. Last, but certainly not least, we owe gratitude to our proofreaders and reviewers for their proofreading and language editing efforts. We cannot stress enough how much we appreciate the final support we received from those colleagues and honest friends who morally and collegially supported us in the final phase of this project. Veselin Mitrović & Dónal O’Mathúna December 202

Ethics and Floods: A Systematic Review

Disaster ethics is a developing field of inquiry recognizing the wide variety of ethical issues confronting various professionals involved in planning for and responding to different types of disasters. This article explores how ethical issues related to floods are addressed in academic literature. The review involved analysis of publications on ethics and floods identified in a systematic literature search of electronic databases that included sociological, biomedical, and geophysical sources. The review methods were guided by the PRISMA Statement on systematic reviews, adapted to this topic area, and followed by a qualitative analysis of the included publications. All articles were analyzed using NVivo software version 11. The qualitative analysis showed that further research is needed on the ethical issues involved in flood disasters. Ethical guidelines are needed for flood planners and responders that are based on the consistent application of well-established ethical principles, values, and virtues to the specific circumstances arising with each flood. Flexibility is required in applying such approaches. The results suggest that interdisciplinary collaboration (sociological, biomedical, geophysical, engineering, and ethical) could contribute significantly to the development of ethics in floods

The Ethics of Humanitarian Innovation: Mapping Values Statements and Engaging with Value-Sensitive Design

The humanitarian sector continually faces organizational and operational challenges to respond to the needs of populations affected by war, disaster, displacement, and health emergencies. With the goal of improving the effectiveness and efficiency of response efforts, humanitarian innovation initiatives seek to develop, test, and scale a variety of novel and adapted practices, products, and systems. The innovation process raises important ethical considerations, such as appropriately engaging crisis-affected populations in defining problems and identifying potential solutions, mitigating risks, ensuring accountability, sharing benefits fairly, and managing expectations. This paper aims to contribute to knowledge and practice regarding humanitarian innovation ethics and presents two components related to a value-sensitive approach to humanitarian innovation. First is a mapping of how ethical concepts are mobilized in values statements that have been produced by a diverse set of organizations involved in humanitarian innovation. Analyzing these documents, we identified six primary values (do-no-harm, autonomy, justice, accountability, sustainability, and inclusivity) around which we grouped 12 secondary values and 10 associated concepts. Second are two proposed activities that teams engaged in humanitarian innovation can employ to foreground values as they develop and refine their project’s design, and to anticipate and plan for challenges in enacting these values across the phases of their project. A deliberate and tangible approach to engaging with values within humanitarian innovation design can help to ground humanitarian innovation in ethical commitments by increasing shared understanding amongst team members, promoting attentiveness to values across the stages of innovation, and fostering capacities to anticipate and respond to ethically challenging situations

Ethics, Nanobiosensors and Elite Sport: The Need for a New Governance Framework

Individual athletes, coaches and sports teams seek continuously for ways to improve performance and accomplishment in elite competition. New techniques of performance analysis are a crucial part of the drive for athletic perfection. This paper discusses the ethical importance of one aspect of the future potential of performance analysis in sport, combining the field of biomedicine, sports engineering and nanotechnology in the form of ‘Nanobiosensors’. This innovative technology has the potential to revolutionise sport, enabling real time biological data to be collected from athletes that can be electronically distributed. Enabling precise real time performance analysis is not without ethical problems. Arguments concerning (1) data ownership and privacy; (2) data confidentiality; and (3) athlete welfare are presented alongside a discussion of the use of the Precautionary Principle in making ethical evaluations. We conclude, that although the future potential use of Nanobiosensors in sports analysis offers many potential benefits, there is also a fear that it could be abused at a sporting system level. Hence, it is essential for sporting bodies to consider the development of a robust ethically informed governance framework in advance of their proliferated use

Soot particulate formation and characterization in combustion

Peer reviewed: YesNRC publication: Ye