Mandatory Public Health Programs: To What Standards Should They Be Held?

Abstract

Implicitly and explicitly, human rights have played a significant role in public health debates for decades. At turn of century, when health department officials in United States were debating measures to control sexually transmitted diseases, it was argued that the progress of preventive medicine has been a history of conflict between so-called rights of individual and higher rights of community.' In U.S., government has historically treated human rights in area of infectious disease control differently than in any other area of social policy. In comparing 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 City of New York is an anomaly. It has 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 courts.2 W. A. Purrington commented further: salus populi suprema lex . . . there is no branch of law in which, of late years, individual liberty has been curtailed more than in sanitary legislation.3 While roles of public health departments have