Utilitarianism in the form of promoting the good and diminishing the bad is a key moral belief in the realm of public health. It is one view in concert with others, all working to counterbalance each view to achieve a tenable moral equilibrium. In the extreme cases under consideration herein, such equilibrium dictates that the moral force of health promotion and harm minimization increases in relation to the threat posed to the well being of a larger society. In the case of widespread death or disability caused by a pandemic, this paper contended that an increased threat generates a heightened obligation on the part of HCWs, while also creating a reasonable expectation that those same HCWs will have preferential access to vaccines and treatments. Emerging viral threats in Gabon: health capacities and response to the risk of emerging zoonotic diseases in Central Africa Emerging infectious diseases (EID) are currently the major threat to public health worldwide and most EID events have involved zoonotic infectious agents. Central Africa in general and Gabon in particular are privileged areas for the emergence of zoonotic EIDs. Indeed, human incursions in Gabonese forests for exploitation purposes lead to intensified contacts between humans and wildlife thus generating an increased risk of emergence of zoonotic diseases. In Gabon, 51 endemic or potential endemic viral infectious diseases have been reported. Among them, 22 are of zoonotic origin and involve 12 families of viruses. The most notorious are dengue, yellow fever, ebola, marburg, Rift Valley fever and chikungunya viruses. Potential EID due to wildlife in Gabon are thereby plentiful and need to be inventoried. The Gabonese Public Health system covers geographically most of the country allowing a good access to sanitary information and efficient monitoring of emerging diseases. However, access to treatment and prevention is better in urban areas where medical structures are more developed and financial means are concentrated even though the population is equally distributed between urban and rural areas. In spite of this, Gabon could be a good field for investigating the emergence or re-emergence of zoonotic EID. Indeed Gabonese health research structures such as CIRMF, advantageously located, offer high quality researchers and facilities that study pathogens and wildlife ecology, aiming toward a better understanding of the contact and transmission mechanisms of new pathogens from wildlife to human, the emergence of zoonotic EID and the breaking of species barriers by pathogens. Despite intensive research and considerable effort from public health agencies to prevent or eradicate infectious diseases, emerging infectious diseases (EID) are currently the major threat to public health worldwide. 1 Indeed, many new infectious agents, characterized by a high pathogenic potential, have been recently identified. Furthermore, some well known pathogens have been expanding their territories, causing increasing concerns in the recent decades due to changing epidemiological patterns. 2 Most of these EID events have involved zoonotic infectious agents: more than 60% of EID affecting humans have a zoonotic origin 3, 4 and B75% of the diseases that have emerged over the past two decades have wildlife sources. 5 Therefore, zoonotic EID represent a major and increasing threat to global health. 1, 3, 6 Zoonoses refer to infectious diseases that are susceptible to be transmitted from animals to humans and are responsible worldwide for a great deal of pain, morbidity and even human fatalities. Two categories of zoonotic diseases have been described: 4 (1) diseases for which transmission events to humans are rare but once occurred, horizontal transmission from human-to-human maintains a more or less sustainable infectious cycle (for example: ebola virus, from naturally infected chiropteran to human epidemics); (2) diseases for which direct or vector-mediated animal-tohuman transmission remains the common source of human infection (for example: Rift Valley fever virus (RVFV), mosquito-transmitted from infected domestic ungulates).