Roundtable: Health System Strengthening: New Potential for Public Health and Human Rights Collaboration

Human rights and the new public health.

The exciting and rapidly advancing dialogue between health and human rights is helping to define more clearly the challenges and perspectives of a new approach to public health. Public health has a complex intellectual and operational history, within which there is a long and respected tradition of understanding health as linked with various social realities, expressed or analyzed through occup...

Bioterrorism, public health, and human rights.

It is unnecessary and counterproductive to sacrifice basic human rights to respond to bioterrorism. Constructive public health legislation, which must be federal, cannot be carefully drafted under panic conditions. When it is, like the "model act," it will predictably rely on broad, arbitrary state authority exercised without public accountability. Public health should resist reverting to its n...

Environmental Protection, Public Health and Human Rights

Is Human Rights Prepared? Risk, Rights and Public Health Emergencies

A new force seems to be at work in public health law and practice. Consider, for example, the proliferation of references to ‘preparedness’; specifically, ‘public health emergency preparedness’ and its more specialised variants such as ‘public health emergency legal preparedness’ and ‘international legal preparedness’. There is also increasing use of related phrases such as ‘global public healt...

Where Public Health Meets Human Rights

In 2014, the World Health Organization (WHO) initiated a process for validation of the elimination of mother-to-child transmission (EMTCT) of HIV and syphilis by countries. For the first time in such a process for the validation of disease elimination, WHO introduced norms and approaches that are grounded in human rights, gender equality, and community engagement. This human rights-based valida...