CORE--ETHICAL, POLICY, AND LEGAL

It is the purpose of the Ethical, Policy, and Legal Core to serve the goals of the HIV Center by: A) providing consultation to the Center's projects that will confront important ethical, legal, and policy issues. Members of the Core will be available for consultation with project directors as ethical, legal, or policy issues surface. When an issue is multifaceted and requires the consultation of experts in policy, ethics, and law, the core as a whole will be asked to meet with the project director. B) Initiating empirical studies on questions with an ethical or policy dimension. In the first year of the project, a study of self- disclosure of HIV status to sex partners will be undertaken. C) Identifying issues requiring legal, ethical and policy analysis that will be undertaken by the core. The co-principal investigators together with members of the Core will identify two issues a year that will be the subject of analysis. the outcome of that research will be, in each instance, the production of a paper outlining the ethical, legal, and policy issues involved in a particular problem. D) Providing an institutional context for Core members to present their work for critical review. In addition to undertaking collaborative work, the Core will provide a context for its members to present their own ongoing HIV- related research on ethical, legal, and policy issues for critical review at its monthly meetings. E) Serving as a resource to policy markers confronting ethical, policy, and legal issues raised by the AIDS epidemic. The Core will make itself available to the New York City Health Department, the New York State Health Department's AIDS Institute, the Westchester Health Department, and the Health and Hospitals Corporation (New York City's Municipal hospital system) to serve as a forum for the discussion of ethical, legal, and policy issues faced by those entities.