Business ethics Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words - 4

Business ethics - Essay Example that there was a big problem with epidemics of AIDS along with hepatitis B, hepatitis C and some other lethal diseases among American medical workers during the 1990s. The problem concerned the fact that the syringes that hospitals provided their workers with were extremely unsafe, as they were constructed the way that it was easy to get a needlestick injury if used inappropriately. Hence, nurses often got injured in some extreme medical situations that required fast actions; very often they got injuries with the syringes that contained the blood of the patients that had the lethal diseases mentioned above. The cost of such injuries was estimated at $400 million to $1 billion a year. Thus on December 6, 1991, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) brought in safety precautions and obligated hospitals to provide their workers with special trainings concerning prevention of the injuries like that. However the prevention measures caused a lot of discussions, as they were not efficient at all. The point was that considering the difficulty of nurses’ work and their obligation to react immediately most of the time, it appeared to be impossible to teach them how to avoid accidents involving injuries. About 70 percent of all the needles and syringes used by U.S. health care workers were manufactured by Becton Dickinson. Even though the huge harm had been done to medical workers, production of a new design of safer syringes required a lot of funds and resources, as reorganization of manufacturing would cost a lot of money for Becton Dickinson. Therefore the company wanted to shorten their expenses and the only measure they suggested was putting warning labels on their production without any actual engineering changes in the syringes. However, on December 23, 1986, a patent for a syringe with a tube surrounding the body of the syringe that could be pulled down to cover and protect the needle on the syringe was issued to Norma Sampson (a nurse) and