It is also important to note that 5.2% of our participants said that they would not have chosen this profession if they had been informed of the risks. In other words, most of those HCWs who claimed that they were uninformed of the occupational risks when they entered the faculty, or were not fully informed of them during their education period, stated that they still would have chosen the medical profession even if they had been more aware of the risks. This finding tells us that, generally speaking, HCWs place relatively little importance on being informed beforehand. Further support for these findings comes from the answers given by the participants to the other questions. Nearly half said that there is no SLR, and the other half felt that the diseases they evaluate would not surpass SLR if the appropriate protective measures are available. Also, Table 2 indicates that at least 28.3% of the participants thought that none of the diseases listed in that table would exceed the SLR regardless of circumstances. It can therefore be concluded that a large majority of the HCWs place more emphasis on their working conditions than on being informed beforehand. In addition, the criteria most commonly stated by the participants for determining the SLR were the likelihood of transmission of a disease, whether protective measures are available and whether immunization is possible. Each of these criteria is related to protecting the HCW from infection, not to the treatment or the effects of a particular disease. This means that as long as protective measures are available, the HCWs would regard a given disease as below the SLR, so it has nothing to do with being informed beforehand. Besides, the only disease used as an example in this study that could be claimed to exceed the SLR was SARS; AIDS, hepatitis C, hepatitis B, tuberculosis and bacterial meningitis all fell below the SLR according to these criteria. Nevertheless, only 30.9% of the participants suggested that SARS would surpass the SLR. To put this into perspective, SARS was not even observed until 2003, and the research in the present study was conducted in 2004 and 2005. Therefore, most participants in this study were not aware of SARS when they chose the medical profession, nor were they ever informed of it during education or training. They nonetheless felt that the duty to treat pertained even to patients with SARS. All of this suggests that factors more useful and relevant than presumed consent influence the decision of HCWs to choose and continue in the medical profession; these factors may include the social contract between society and the medical profession, and the greater ability of HCWs to provide medical care [16] . It is these factors that should be investigated and emphasized when defining a moral duty to treat.