DETROIT - Lance Gable, an internationally known expert on bioethics and public health law at Wayne State University Law School, is available to the media to discuss ethical and legal questions about preventing the spread of Ebola.
Ebola is confirmed in the United States in at least one patient, and how to prevent the disease from spreading raises all sorts of ethical and legal questions:
- How does the law deal with quarantine and isolation?
- If a medication to help ease symptoms becomes scarce, how do public health officials decide who gets it?
- Should or can the government legally limit who travels to and from West Africa, the hotbed of the Ebola virus?
Gable is associate dean for academic affairs at Wayne Law.
He leads a multi-disciplinary state ethics committee creating guidelines for healthcare and public health systems in Michigan in the case of a public health emergency. He's also co-chair of WSU's Stem Cell Research Oversight Committee. Before joining Wayne Law's faculty in 2006, Gable served as a senior fellow at the Centers for Law and the Public Health: A Collaborative at Georgetown and John Hopkins Universities that is affiliated with the World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
He previously was project director for the Emergency System for Advanced Registration of Volunteer Health Professionals Legal and Regulatory Issues Project administered by the U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration and the Alfred P. Sloan Fellow in Bioterrorism Law and Policy and Georgetown University Law Center.
Intrigued by bioethical issues from an early age, he earned a bachelor's degree in political science and biology from Johns Hopkins, a master of public health degree from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and his law degree from Georgetown.
Photo: Lance Gable
To reach Gable for comments, contact Shawn Starkey at sstarkey@wayne.edu or 313-577-4629.