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Mandatory public health programs: to what standards should they be held?
Editorial

Mandatory public health programs: to what standards should they be held?

S Jody Heymann and Randall L Sell
Health and human rights, v 4(1), pp 193-203
1999
DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/4065173
PMID: 10438560

Abstract

Public Health Administration - standards Communicable Disease Control - standards Humans Tuberculosis - drug therapy Human Rights Coercion United States
Implicitly and explicitly, human rights have played a significant role in public health debates for decades. At the turn of the century, when health department officials in the United States were debating measures to control sexually transmitted diseases, it was argued that "the progress of preventive medicine has been a history of the conflict between the so-called rights of the individual and the higher rights of the community."' In the U.S., the government has historically treated human rights in the area of infectious disease control differently than in any other area of social policy. In comparing the Department of Health to other municipal departments in New York, Stephen Smith, a Department of Health member from its establishment in 1868 until 1875, wrote: "The Department of Health of the City of New York is an anomaly. It has the power to make laws, to execute those laws and to sit in judgment on its own acts. Its acts within this sphere of its jurisdiction can not be interrupted or even reviewed by the courts."2 W. A. Purrington commented further: "salus populi suprema lex . . . there is no branch of the law in which, of late years, individual liberty has been curtailed more than in sanitary legislation."3

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