Ethics of screening

Screening is the presumptive identification of an unrecognized disease or condition by the use of tests, examinations, or other procedures that can help apparently well individuals who have a disease or disease precursor. Several frameworks for analyzing and addressing ethical and policy issues in public health screening programs have been proposed. Screening raises a number of important ethical issues, including provisions for obtaining informed consent, protecting privacy and confidentiality, and balancing risks and potential benefits, and issues pertaining to targeted screening of higher-risk persons. Other ethical considerations relate to costs and how best to allocate finite public resources for screening.