Tausig, MarkSelgelid, MichaelSubedi, SreeSubedi, Janardan2015-12-070141-9889http://hdl.handle.net/1885/17077After a history of neglect, bioethicists have recently turned their attention to the topic of infectious disease. In this paper we link bioethicists' earlier neglect of infectious disease to their under-appreciation of the extent to which the problem of infectious disease is related to social factors and thus to questions of justice. We argue that a social causation of illness model - well-known to sociologists of medicine, but incompletely understood by bioethicists - will improve future bioethical analysis of issues related to infectious disease. By emphasising the relationships between social and economic structures of inequality and health, the social causation model provides a richer approach to ethical issues associated with infectious disease than the more commonly used biomedical model.Keywords: article; bioethics; communicable disease; developing country; ethics; human; mortality; poverty; sociology; Bioethics; Communicable Diseases; Developing Countries; Humans; Poverty; Sociology, Medical Bioethics; Infectious disease; Poor countries; Social causation200610.1111/j.1467-9566.2006.00545.x2015-12-07