goal of their ethical calling, physicians, nurses and other health care workers are obliged to treat the sick and potentially infectious patients and, in so doing, they are to take some personal risk (Murray 2003). This was the bottom line of the assessment and stand made by Dr. Henry Masur and his colleagues at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID), particularly during the outbreak of dread global SARS in Canada and Hong Kong last year. They also referred to other epidemics, such as the HIV / AIDS.

Masur emphasized that this primary goal and obligation is voluntary and sets the medical profession apart from other professions, precisely because of the involvement of some personal risk in fulfilling that obligation. Besides physicians, medical professionals are nurses, dentists and health workers. Records of the first SARS outbreaks in Toronto and Hong Kong showed that a huge 50% of those...
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