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James C. Thomas, MPH, PhD, Michael Sage, MPH, Jack Dillenberg, DDS, MPH and V. James Guillory, DO, MPH

James C. Thomas is with the Department of Epidemiology and the Program in Public Health Ethics, University of North Carolina School of Public Health, Chapel Hill. Michael Sage is with the National Center for Environmental Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, Ga. Jack Dillenberg is with the School of Dentistry and Oral Health, Arizona School of Health Sciences, Phoenix. V. James Guillory is with the Department of Preventive Medicine and Division of Research, University of Health Sciences, Kansas City, Mo.

Correspondence: Requests for reprints should be sent to James C. Thomas, MPH, PhD, 2104-B McGavran-Greenberg Hall, CB#7435, School of Public Health, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-7035 (e-mail: jim.thomas@unc.edu).

	Because this article has no abstract, we have provided an extract of the first 100 words of the full text and any section headings.

	INTRODUCTION

 
The mandate to ensure and protect the health of the public is an inherently moral one. It carries with it an obligation to care for the well-being of communities, and it implies the possession of an element of power to carry out that mandate. The need to exercise power to ensure the health of populations and, at the same time, to avoid abuses of such power are at the crux of public health ethics.

Until recently, the ethical nature of public health has been implicitly assumed rather than explicitly stated. Increasingly, however, society is demanding explicit attention to ethics. This . . . [Full Text]

	THE PROCESS OF WRITING THE CODE

 

	THE CONTENT OF THE CODE

 

	DISSEMINATION AND ADOPTION OF THE CODE

 

	FUTURE IMPROVEMENTS

 

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