The New Public Health Litigation

On Folk Devils, Moral Panics and New Wave Public Health

New wave public health places an emphasis on exhorting individuals to engage in healthy behaviour with good health being a signifier of virtuous moral standing, whereas poor health is often associated with personal moral failings. In effect, the medical is increasingly being collapsed into the moral. This approach is consistent with other aspects of contemporary neolibe...

Tobacco industry litigation and the role of government: a public health perspective.

Litigation and public health policy making: the case of tobacco control.

Many tobacco control advocates, believing that legislators and regulators have failed to enact and implement sufficiently stringent tobacco control laws, have supported litigation as a means of achieving public health policy goals. In this article, we examine the relationship between litigation and public health policy formulation in the context of the debate over tobacco control policy. The fu...

Tobacco industry litigation to deter local public health ordinances: the industry usually loses in court.

BACKGROUND The tobacco industry uses claims of state preemption or violations of the US Constitution in litigation to overturn local tobacco control ordinances. METHODS Collection of lawsuits filed or threatened against local governments in the USA; review of previously secret tobacco industry documents; interviews with key informants. RESULTS The industry is most likely to prevail when a c...

Ecological Approaches in the New Public Health

In stark contrast to individual-level approaches to health promotion, ecological approaches target multiple influences of health behavior, because changing individuals and their behaviors may be temporary without corresponding changes to the environment in which they are embedded. Using an ecological approach, supportive environmental factors are considered when designing effective and sustaina...