Contemporary Issues in Public Health Emergency Law

This chapter explores the two threats that dominate contemporary discussion in public health emergency law: bioterrorism and the emergence of new infectious diseases for which there may be no effective treatment. It also examines them through the lens of the legal issues they raise. In particular, it focuses on three topics: the legal and ethical principles for approaching the problem of how to ration and distribute medications when there is not enough to treat everyone in the population; how a mass quarantine in today's society could be effective and what its cost would be; and the questions raised by the possibility of imposing domestic and international travel restrictions. This chapter begins by describing the most important underlying facts related to bioterrorism and emerging infectious diseases.