Emergency Preparedness for a Pandemic Influenza: Ethical Challenges for Black Ministers and the Public Health Community

The Pandemic Influenza Conference held at the Interdenominational Theological Center and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, posed four major ethical challenges: 1) the professional diversity ethical challenge; 2) the faith/reason ethical challenge; 3) the doing good in the face of chaos ethical challenge; and 4) the faith/reason line of divide ethical challenge.*

The professional diversity ethical challenge.

The first challenge concerns the need for better collaboration between leaders of the public health community and those of the organized faith communities for the sake of the society's health. We can call this the professional diversity ethical challenge.

This challenge poses the question, How do Black religious leaders of all faiths collaborate with leaders of the public health community in emergency preparedness for a (widely predicted) pandemic influenza outbreak? This question suggests the need for an ethic of mutual respect, for which we will try to make the case below, between the leaders of these two professional communities. An ethic of mutual respect is predicated on the moral belief that professionals of the faith communities and public health community are intentionally working together for the common good of society. ^† Mutual respect among health and ministerial professionals for each other's utility and intrinsic value is a prerequisite for emergency preparedness for any potential pandemic influenza epidemic outbreak. A critical understanding of each other's world views must be viewed as foundational for the leaders of these two different professional communities. An ethic of mutual respect must be built on this presupposition in order to promote the loyalty of all to the community's common good.

Presumably, an ethic of mutual respect must start with these different professionals' respective theoretical and practical ethical understandings of power and authority in situations of assumed normalcy. Emergency circumstances tend to make abnormal claims upon the professional's agentive capacity to perform ethically. In such an emergency, the professional leader of organized faith and the leader of the public health community may well experience an ethical crisis of decision-making regarding the rightness or wrongness of an act.

Inquiries such as this are necessary for health professionals and leaders of organized faiths to programmatically develop, in partnership with each other, a culture of mutual respect for one another's utilitarian worth. Formal dialogue between leaders of both communities must come to be viewed as a necessity on both sides of the professional divide. Only if this is done under regular conditions will these two groups have a better understanding of what is needed for emergency preparedness.

A primary need is for professionals on both sides of the divide to overcome superficial ways of perceiving and relating to each other before such an emergency occurs. For instance, public health professionals must mitigate organized faith leaders' fear of only being used by them when the former deem it convenient. In the Black community, public health leaders have left a negative record, in some instances, of treating the Black body as a means to a scientific end. The United States Public Health Service's syphilis study at Tuskegee is a classic case in point. Black leaders of organized faith groups must overcome the stereotype, which some outsiders have of them, of only being interested in the souls of their people.

Dividing the Black individual into body and soul has radically affected different ways of valuing him/her in the public health community as well as in organized communities of faith. On both sides of the divide leaders have been guilty of ignoring the wholistic worth of Blacks individually and collectively, and especially the worth of those trapped in poverty. For instance, whom does the public health official see when responding to the health needs of the poverty-enshrined Black group(s) before and during an influenza emergency? Does the health professional's stereotypical perception of the group influence his/her ethical decisions in the delivery of services?

Poverty-stricken Blacks must not only be seen...