Saving Lives by Counting Properly Some Notes on Triage and Disaster Ethics

Abstract

In disasters, multiple victims are involved that exceed the capacities and resources of emergencies available to face the necessary help. As in other areas of public health ethics, the allocation of resources and the rights and care of populations in mass casualty incidents often triumph over the priority given by mainstream bioethics to autonomy and individual rights and care. Triage is a series of standardized methods that use calculation and rank ordering in medicine. Patients are quantitatively represented by algorithmic and numerical triage systems, and some of them even categorize the victims with scales and scores. In disaster triage, consequentialist criteria consistent with this quantification of the bodies prevail that order to save as many lives as possible while making the best use of available resources, which often means to prioritize the patients who are more likely to survive.