SynthesisBMC public health2017
Ethical issues in public health surveillance: a systematic qualitative review.
Synthesis in BMC public health, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 35 papers, 5 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
35 citing papers in PubMed, 5 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Social justice for adults with high body weight: a systematic review.International journal for equity in health · 2026Pooled it
- The ethical landscape of robot-assisted surgery: a systematic review.Journal of robotic surgery · 2025Pooled it
- Mapping ethical issues in the use of smart home health technologies to care for older persons: a systematic review.BMC medical ethics · 2023Pooled it
- Ethical issues in biomedical research using electronic health records: a systematic review.Medicine, health care, and philosophy · 2021Pooled it
- Electronic health record-based disease surveillance systems: A systematic literature review on challenges and solutions.Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA · 2020Pooled it
- The Continuity Trap in Data Science Health Research.Journal of medical Internet research · 2026Article
- Challenges and potential opportunities for improving One Health surveillance in low-resource settings: Insights from rabies surveillance in Malawi.One health outlook · 2026Article
- Building data science capacity in the public health workforce: a Public Health Data Science Life Cycle framework.Frontiers in public health · 2026Review
- Communicating Community-Based Public Health Surveillance: Lessons from Profiling Public Risk Perceptions of COVID-19 Wastewater Monitoring.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2025Article
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- Article
- Ethical preparedness of data monitoring committees (DMCs) to oversee international clinical trials: a qualitative descriptive study.BMJ global health · 2024Article
- Wastewater-based surveillance as a tool for public health action: SARS-CoV-2 and beyond.Clinical microbiology reviews · 2024Review
- Article
- Introducing professionalism and medical ethics in undergraduate integrative medical curriculum through a four-dimensional model.Journal of education and health promotion · 2024Article
- Review
- Lessons learned from community engagement regarding phylodynamic research with molecular HIV surveillance data.Journal of the International AIDS Society · 2023Article
- Empirical studies on how ethical recommendations are translated into practice: a cross-section study on scope and study objectives.BMC medical ethics · 2023Article
- Ethical principles for infodemiology and infoveillance studies concerning infodemic management on social media.Frontiers in public health · 2023Article
- Wastewater research and surveillance: an ethical exploration.Environmental science : water research & technology · 2022Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundPublic health surveillance is not ethically neutral and yet, ethics guidance and training for surveillance programmes is sparse. Development of ethics guidance should be based on comprehensive and transparently derived overviews of ethical issues and arguments. However, existing overviews on surveillance ethics are limited in scope and in how transparently they derived their results. Our objective was accordingly to provide an overview of ethical issues in public health surveillance; in addition, to list the arguments put forward with regards to arguably the most contested issue in surveillance, that is whether to obtain informed consent.
methodsEthical issues were defined based on principlism. We assumed an ethical issue to arise in surveillance when a relevant normative principle is not adequately considered or two principles come into conflict. We searched Pubmed and Google Books for relevant publications. We analysed and synthesized the data using qualitative content analysis.
resultsOur search strategy retrieved 525 references of which 83 were included in the analysis. We identified 86 distinct ethical issues arising in the different phases of the surveillance life-cycle. We further identified 20 distinct conditions that make it more or less justifiable to forego informed consent procedures.
conclusionsThis is the first systematic qualitative review of ethical issues in public health surveillance resulting in a comprehensive ethics matrix that can inform guidelines, reports, strategy papers, and educational material and raise awareness among practitioners.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.