Public Health Law II: Contemporary Threats

In this chapter, we will explore how the legal system is responding to the biggest public health threats of the moment. “Of the moment” may be the key phrase here. We have seen in the previous chapter how disease became associated in the public mind with threats from “outsiders,” which led to medically unwarranted quarantines in the 19th and early 20th centuries. After those fears subsided and the Great Influenza Epidemic of 1918 ran its course, the field of public health settled into a sleepy backwater of the law, and the strategy for suppression of disease came to depend more on scientific discoveries such as penicillin and the polio vaccine.