Leading during times of trouble: a roundtable discussion of recent terror events.
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Biomedical subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Georges Benjamin.
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Explore the source record for details and available documents.
Explore the source record for details and available documents.
The partnership that has developed over the years between elected officials, health directors, and attorneys came about through necessity and practicality. This article examines this partnership and some of the conflicts and problems it contains. The article discusses the problems of overlap of authority between public health departments and elected officials. It also emphasizes that existing laws and regulations often provide sufficiently flexible authority, and that such laws and regulations can be exercised in new ways to address current public health problems. The article concludes with a discussion of the challenges faced by public health officials and legislators in forming a partnership to secure necessary financial support and legal authority for public health activities.
New laws or regulations may not be a practical response to a public health threat. While in some instances legislation or regulation may be the only alternative to protecting the public's health, in many situations public health authorities and their legal counsel must consider alternative approaches to abating threats. This article provides an overview of the alternatives available to the public health official by providing discussion of a "legal tool box" available to public health officials. It also presents scenarios, with commentary, that serve as the basis for illustration of other means of intervention.
Responding to a terrorist biological weapon attack poses new challenges not only for the public health response community but also to the very construct of public health police powers as we know them today. States are debating the merits of revising and updating these powers in order to ensure an effective and legally appropriate response. This article covers three aspects of the policy debate: the experience in one state from a legislative perspective, a discussion from an academic viewpoint, and one example of the role of enhanced powers from the response perspective.