HMS News
October 20, 2016
By Bobbie Collins

When Ebola broke out in West Africa two years ago, Diana Alame was participating in a Harvard Medical school clinical microbiology fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital.

During the epidemic, she and her colleagues pondered, “How do we provide the best patient care? How do we take care of the people who are handling specimens from infected patients?”

Toward the end of that fellowship, when Alame was considering her next career steps, HMS announced it would begin offering a Masters in Bioethics degree (MBE).

The issues raised by the Ebola outbreak and by another of Alame’s fellowship projects—working on antimicrobial stewardship—tied in well with the new opportunity. Alame applied and was accepted.

Now, as an HMS master’s student, Alame wants to learn how to move beyond gut reactions when solving bioethical dilemmas. She wants to develop clear reasoning skills that will help her arrive at a moral justification for why a given issue in medicine should be handled a certain way.

Alame believes that given the natural history of infectious disease outbreaks in a globalized world and the non-judicious use of antimicrobials, “We will face more of these types of difficult situations.”

Read the full article at HMS News