Medicine's Duty to Treat Pandemic Illness: Solidarity and Vulnerability: Most Accounts of Why Physicians Have a Duty to Treat Patients During a Pandemic Look to the Special Ethical Standards of the Medical Profession. An Adequate Account Must Be Deeper and Broader: It Must Set the Professional Duty Alongside Other Individual Commitments and Broader Social Values‪.‬

In the wake of SARS and with the possibility of bioterror, pandemic avian influenza, and other emerging infections looming, bioethicists are exploring the extent of a health professional's duty to treat the victims of such an infectious outbreak, even at some substantial risk to the caregiver's own health or life. The World Health Organization announced in August 2003 that 20 percent of all persons known to have been infected with SARS were health care workers. Three of the forty-one people who died of SARS in Canada were health professionals, as were six of the 180 who died in Taiwan. (1) Dr. Carlo Urbani of Medecins Sans Frontieres, who with others initially identified SARS as a new infectious disease in Hanoi, voluntarily quarantined himself and eventually died of SARS, leaving a widow and three children. (2) Should we regard Dr. Urbani as a medical hero, or as a physician simply doing his duty? Physicians' moral duties arise from at least two sources. As members of society, they owe the same general duties to others as any citizen. In addition--as one of us has previously argued--they assume a further set of moral duties connected with the nature of medicine as a practice. By announcing to the community that they are practitioners of medicine, physicians implicitly accept and undertake these duties. (3) Although the core features of the internal morality of medicine persist over time, the interpretations of these duties are not static and are implicitly renegotiated with society as the practice of medicine evolves. (4)