Pregnant women are among the groups that should receive H1N1 (swine) flu vaccinations this fall, according to the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices panel whose recommendations are generally accepted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Other groups that should receive priority inoculations are health care workers and their children, children and young adults ages six months through 24 years, parents and other caregivers of infants, and nonelderly adults with high-risk medical conditions.
Dr. Ruth Faden, director of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics, is available to discuss the ethical ramifications of this recommendation and other morally challenging dimensions of pandemic influenza, health care reform, and research involving pregnant women.
Dr. Faden, along with bioethicists from other leading universities, published an article in the July 9 online issue of the American Journal of Public Health urging organizers of a recently begun $3 billion, decades-long study of children's health to immediately add provisions to look at the health and medical profiles of the children's mothers during their pregnancies.
Ruth Faden, Ph.D., M.P.H.
Philip Franklin Wagley Professor of Biomedical Ethics; Director, Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics; Professor, Department of Health Policy & Management, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health; Professor, Department of Medicine, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. She is also a Senior Research Scholar at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Georgetown University.