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An Overview Of Public Health In The New Millenium: Individual Liberty Vs. Public Safety, Dorothy Puzio

Journal of Law and Health

This article explores the tensions between creating an effective public health system that would be able to respond to and protect against any public health threat, and protecting individuals against unnecessary intrusions on their civil liberties. It then considers approaches to this issue that might best strike a balance in a democratic society. While many Americans may recognize and even accept that greater security would entail some intrusion into individual rights, there is no formula for striking the appropriate balance. This article attempts to arrive at a workable framework by examining how the United States' public health system works. This …

Vanishing Vaccinations: Why Are So Many Americans Opting Out Of Vaccinating Their Children?, Steve P. Calandrillo

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Vaccinations against life-threatening diseases are one of the greatest public health achievements in history. Literally millions of premature deaths have been prevented, and countless more children have been saved from disfiguring illness. While vaccinations carry unavoidable risks, the medical, social and economic benefits they confer have led all fifty states to enact compulsory childhood vaccination laws to stop the spread of preventable diseases. Today, however, vaccines are becoming a victim of their success-many individuals have never witnessed the debilitating diseases that vaccines protect against, allowing complacency toward immunization requirements to build. Antivaccination sentiment is growing fast in the United States, …

Health Of The People: The Highest Law?, Lawrence O. Gostin

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Law and ethics in population health are undergoing a renaissance. Once fashionable during the Industrial and Progressive eras, the ideals of population health began to wither with the rise of liberalism in the late twentieth century. In their place came a sharpened focus on personal and economic freedom. Political attention shifted from population health to individual health and from public health to private medicine.

The field of public health law and ethics needs a theory and definition (what is public health law and ethics and what are its doctrinal boundaries?); a well-articulated vision (why should health be a salient public …

Sars And International Legal Preparedness, Lawrence O. Gostin, Jason W. Sapsin, Jon S. Vernick, Stephen P. Teret, Scott Burris

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This article does not advance arguments regarding the efficacy or circumstances under which governments should exercise personal control measures such as quarantine or isolation. A literature on this aspect of SARS disease control strategies is just starting to develop more fully. Instead, we highlight the legal aspects of personal control measures employed against SARS in order to emphasize the importance of understanding public health law's role in authorizing and constraining disease control strategies, as well as the importance of legal preparedness in nations governed under the rule of law. In the contemporary international environment, one nation's failure in legal preparedness …

Vanishing Vaccinations: Why Are So Many Americans Opting Out Of Vaccinating Their Children?, Steve P. Calandrillo

Articles

Part I of this Article details the historical development and medical achievements made possible by vaccines. From Edward Jenner to Jonas Salk to Albert Sabin, immense strides have been made in eradicating or substantially eliminating some of the worst diseases in human history. Smallpox, polio, measles, mumps, rubella, diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus, influenza, hepatitis A and B, and even the chicken pox are all now largely preventable.

Literally hundreds of millions of deaths have been avoided and many more lives markedly improved, to say nothing of the financial ramifications for the American healthcare system. All fifty states have therefore enacted compulsory …

Licensing Health Care Professionals: Has The United States Outlived The Need For Medical Licensure?, Gregory Dolin

All Faculty Scholarship

With an expanding market for what is now known as "complimentary and alternative" medicine (CAM), states are increasingly facing the issue of who can and who should be allowed to practice medicine. Of necessity, this question also concerns whom patients may see to treat their ailments.

This paper will argue that the struggle to define who is and who is not licensed to practice medicine is rather fruitless and will always leave patients with less choice than they desire. Part II will review the history of licensure in the United States. Parts III and IV will focus on benefits and …

Smart Growth For Community Development, Wendy Collins Perdue

Law Faculty Publications

The built environment has a profound effect on public health. For instance, community transportation policy influences pollution levels, which in turn contribute to levels of illness and death. The panelists for this session elaborate on this concept with perspectives drawn from varied experiences.

Parks As Gyms? Recreational Paradigms And Public Health In The National Parks, Jay D. Wexler

Faculty Scholarship

When scholars and policymakers think about the relationship between public health and environmental law and policy, they likely think first about controlling pollution and other toxic substances. As other articles have amply demonstrated, water pollution, air pollution, and other environmental toxins can have significant deleterious effects on the public's health. Scholars rightly pay serious attention to these relationships, and policymakers wisely devise methods and strategies to ameliorate the public health risks posed by these polluting substances.

Although pollution control might be the most obvious and important intersection between environmental policy and public health, legal and policy decisions regarding the management …

Fighting The Axis Of Illness: Hiv/Aids, Human Rights, And U.S. Foreign Policy, David P. Fidler

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Constitutional Outlines Of Public Health's "New World Order", David P. Fidler

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Arthritic Flexibilities: Analysis Of Wto Action Regarding Paragraph 6 Of The Doha Declaration On The Trips Agreement And Public Health, Brook K. Baker

ExpressO

This paper explores the tortured history of developing countries’ pursuit of access to affordable generic medicines that they are unable to produce efficiently on their own. Having lost rights to treat medicines as essential commodities and as generalized exceptions to patent protections in the WTO TRIPS Agreement, developing countries and public health activists temporarily reasserted the primacy of health over profits in the Doha Declaration on the TRIPS Agreement and Public Health in November of 2001. However, since most developing countries lack meaningful pharmaceutical capacity to manufacture medicines efficiently on their own, they needed flexibility to import medicines from countries …

Occupational Risk: The Outrageous Reaction To Hiv Positive Public Safety And Health Care Employees In The Workplace, Manju Gupta

ExpressO

No abstract provided.

Medical Response For Terrorist And Public Health Threats: One Region's Experience (Pittsburgh), Eileen Salinsky, Lisa Sprague

National Health Policy Forum

This site visit, planned and convened in conjunction with the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s User Liaison Program, examined the efforts underway in the greater Pittsburgh area to develop emergency medical response capabilities for mass causality events. The site visit explored efforts to improve infectious disease surveillance capabilities and looked at the Region 13 collaborative’s development of a regionalized approach to emergency management planning and response. Hospital preparedness activities were also studied, including a discussion of lessons learned from a recent drill to test response to a radiological event and an exploration of conceptual frameworks to guide hospital planning …

Following The Man On The Clapham Omnibus: Social Science Evidence In Malpractice Litigation, Richard O. Lempert

Law & Economics Working Papers Archive: 2003-2009

This article responds to proposals to admit statistical evidence from empirical studies of actual health care practices to prove prevailing health practice standards in malpractice litigation by arguing that the case for doing so has numerous weaknesses that advocates of admitting such data commonly ignore. A fundamental concern is that the standard of practice defense co-evolved with prevailing modes of proof and might have been different had proof through experts not allowed for an aspirational as well as an empirical element to reach the jury. The article also argues that generating reliable statistical evidence of standard medical practice can be …

Obesity In America: A Growing Threat, Eileen Salinsky, Wakina Scott

National Health Policy Forum

This background paper seeks to clarify the nature and causes of the obesity epidemic in the United States and provides an overview of the associated economic and health costs. The paper summarizes existing federal programs and policies that address obesity and examines new and emerging policy strategies to battle the bulging American silhouette. Topics explored include population-based prevention, federal food- and nutrition-assistance programs, Medicare and Medicaid payment policies, school health initiatives, and publicly funded biomedical research.

Academics And Bioterrorists: New Thinking About The New Terror, Richard Danzig

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Bioterrorism Meets Privacy: An Analysis Of The Model State Emergency Health Powers Act And The Hipaa Privacy Rule, Julie Bruce

Annals of Health Law and Life Sciences

Ms. Bruce's paper analyzes the interplay between the Model State Emergency Health Powers Act and the HIPAA Privacy Rule. The article begins by examining specific relevant provisions of the Act and Rule. Next, it traces the history of public health law through the court system and then uses this foundation to discuss how the Model State Emergency Health Powers Act and the HIPAA Privacy Rule could co-exist, protecting Americans in the case of a bioterror attack, while being appropriately sensitive to the confidentiality of private health information.

Comparative And International Health Law, Timothy Stoltzfus Jost

Scholarly Articles

No abstract provided.

No More Kidding Around: Restructuring Non-Medical Childhood Immunization Exemptions To Ensure Public Health Protection, Ross D. Silverman

Annals of Health Law and Life Sciences

Professor Silverman's article examines the complex challenges faced by U.S. policymakers attempting to balance the public health protections of mandatory childhood immunization programs with the legal, religious, philosophical, and practical concerns raised by permitting non-medical exemptions under the programs. The article begins with a discussion of the history of childhood immunization programs, and continues by describing the inconsistency of enforcement of state immunization laws and exemptions. The author analyzes recent cases from New York, Wyoming, and Arkansas, and discusses how these decisions both pose threats to these programs' public health protections, while also offering insight into potential problems for other …

The Potential Impact Of Genetic Sequencing On The American Health Insurance System, Frederick Levy, Joseph F. Lawler

Journal of Health Care Law and Policy

No abstract provided.

Biodefense: Who's In Charge?, Victoria Sutton

Health Matrix: The Journal of Law-Medicine

No abstract provided.

Looking Backward: The Twentieth Century Revolutions In Psychiatry, Law And Public Mental Health, Sheldon Gelman

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Do histories of psychiatry make a difference--or have legal implications--in the present? Does our current situation help explain what historians say about psychiatry's past? Focusing on the past half century--the era of medications-- this paper explores the reciprocal relationship between the present and the past in psychiatry. Part II sketches the medical developments that constitute the subjects of any history of psychiatry. This Part also examines related developments in law. Part III introduces some problems of psychiatric historiography and examines some historians' attempts to deal with them. Part IV analyzes the account of psychiatry's past contained in Edward Shorter's well-regarded …

Quarantine Redux: Bioterrorism, Aids And The Curtailment Of Individual Liberty In The Name Of Public Health, Wendy E. Parmet

Health Matrix: The Journal of Law-Medicine

No abstract provided.

Racism Or Realpolitik? U.S. Foreign Policy And The Hiv/Aids Catastrophe In Sub-Saharan Africa, David P. Fidler

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Increasing The Supply Of Organs In Transplantation Through Paired Organ Exchanges, Michael T. Morley

Scholarly Publications

No abstract provided.

Cruel But Not Unusual Punishment: The Failure To Provide Adequate Medical Treatment To Female Prisoners In The United States, Kendra Weatherhead

Health Matrix: The Journal of Law-Medicine

No abstract provided.

When Terrorism Threatens Health: How Far Are Limitations On Personal And Ecomonic Liberties Justified, Lawrence O. Gostin

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The government is engaged in a homeland-security project to safeguard the population's health from potential terrorist attacks. This project is politically charged because it affords the state enhanced powers to restrict personal and economic liberties. Just as governmental powers relating to intelligence, law enforcement, and criminal justice curtail individual interests, so too do public health powers.

Public Health And The Built Environment: Historical, Empirical, And Theoretical Foundations For An Expanded Role, Wendy Collins Perdue, Lawrence O. Gostin, Lesley A. Stone

Law Faculty Publications

In 2000, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Environmental Health issued a report that explored some of the ways in which "sprawl" impacts public health. The report has generated great interest, and state health officials are beginning to discuss the relationship between land use and public health. The CDC report has also produced a backlash. For example, the Southern California Building Industry Association labeled the report "a ludicrous sham" and argued that the CDC should stick to "fighting physical diseases, not defending political ones."

In this environment, it is understandable if the CDC looks to such …

The Built Environment And Its Relationship To The Public's Health: The Legal Framework, Wendy Collins Perdue

Law Faculty Publications

Public health advocates can help shape the design of cities and suburbs in ways that improve public health, but to do so effectively they need to understand the legal framework. This article re- views the connection between public health and the built environment and then describes the legal pathways for improving the design of our built environment.

The Model State Emergency Health Powers Act: Public Health And Civil Liberties In A Time Of Terrorism, Lawrence O. Gostin

Health Matrix: The Journal of Law-Medicine

No abstract provided.