Background

In order to develop a comprehensive World Health Organization (WHO) guidance document on ethical Issues in relation to epidemic and outbreak response across a board range of diseases, this first meeting of a network of experts will be held in Dublin City University (DCU) in Dublin, Ireland. The WHO Global Health Ethics Unit has invited experts from different regions of the world and from a variety of backgrounds in both ethics and infectious diseases and outbreak response to meet on May 25-26, 2015. Its purpose will be to review the ‘lessons learnt’ from the current Ebola epidemic, identify the need for additional scoping reviews, discuss the methodology for the development of ethics guidance with broad applicability, and identify the main ethical issues to be addressed. The meeting is funded jointly by WHO, an EU-funded COST Action on Disaster Bioethics chaired from DCU, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, and 3U Global Health, a research collaboration involving DCU.

This provision agenda will be finalised upon completion of background literature reviews currently being conducted by WHO. In addition, WHO has other expert groups scheduled to meet in early May whose findings will feed into the final agenda. On the basis of these reviews, individual participants may be asked to make short informal presentations based on their expertise or experiences. A final agenda will be circulated to all participants the week before the meeting on May 25-26.

Day 1 (Monday, May 25, 2015)

Day 2 (Tuesday, May 26, 2015):