The Contingent Power of Experts: Public Health Policy in the United States, Britain, and France

2007 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
Constance A. Nathanson
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
United States ◽  
Public Policy ◽  
Health Policy ◽  
Health Problem ◽  
Public Health Policy ◽  
Public Health Problem ◽  
The United States ◽  
Health Problems ◽  
Social Processes

Dangers to life and health abound. Even among the subset known to medicine and science, however, there is no guarantee that any particular danger will rise to the level of a recognized public health problem or elicit a response from the makers of public policy. The path from knowledge to policy is not straightforward; scientific consensus does not lead automatically to policy consensus. Judgments of what dangers should be most feared, how to explain them, what to do about them, and even whether they are public health problems at all are the outcome of social processes. A couple of examples may help to clarify these points.

Driving and Public Health

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
United States ◽  
Health Problem ◽  
Cell Phone ◽  
Motor Vehicle ◽  
Electronic Device ◽  
Public Health Problem ◽  
The United States ◽  
Distracted Driving ◽  
The Past

Distracted driving is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “the practice of driving a motor vehicle while engaged in another activity, typically one that involves the use of a mobile phone or other electronic device.” However, other distractions not involving the use of a cell phone or texting are important as well, contributing to this burgeoning public health problem in the United States. Examples include talking to other passengers, adjusting the radio or other controls in the car, and daydreaming. Distracted driving has been linked to increased risk of motor vehicle crashes (MVCs) in the United States, representing one of the most preventable leading causes of death for youth ages 16 to 24 years. Undoubtedly, the proliferation of cell phone, global positioning system (GPS), and other in-vehicle and personal electronic device use while driving has led to this rise in distracted driving prevalence. This behavior has impacted society—including individual and commercial drivers, passengers, pedestrians—in countless numbers of ways, ranging from increased MVCs and deaths to the enactment of new driving laws. In 2016, for example, 20 percent of all US pediatric deaths (nearly 4,000 children and adolescents) were due to fatal MVCs. It has been estimated that at any given time, more than 650,000 drivers are using cell phones or manipulating electronic devices while driving. In the United States, efforts are underway to reduce this driving behavior. In the past two decades, state and federal laws have specifically targeted cell phone use and texting while driving as priority areas for legal intervention. Distracted driving laws have become “strategies of choice” for tackling this public health problem, though their enforcement has emerged as a major challenge and varies by jurisdiction and location. Multimodal interventions using models such as the “three Es” framework—Enactment of a law, Education of the public about the law and safety practices, and Enforcement of the law—have become accepted practice or viewed as necessary steps to successfully change this behavior caused by distractions while driving. This Oxford Bibliographies review introduces these and other aspects (including psychological influences and road conditions) of distracted driving through a presentation of annotated resources from peer- and non-peer-reviewed literature. This selective review aims to provide policymakers, program implementers, and researchers with a reliable source of information on the past and current state of American laws, policies, and priorities for distracted driving.

Defining Commercial Speech in the Context of Food Marketing

2015 ◽  
Vol 43 (S1) ◽  
pp. 40-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer L. Pomeranz ◽  
Sabrina Adler
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
United States ◽  
First Amendment ◽  
Health Problem ◽  
Public Health Problem ◽  
The United States ◽  
Food Marketing ◽  
Policy Strategy ◽  
Commercial Speech ◽  
Poor Nutrition

Obesity is a public health problem in the United States. Experts have identified the regulation of food marketing as a policy strategy to address obesity and poor nutrition. However, the First Amendment can be a barrier to reducing exposure to problematic food marketing. In recent years, courts have become increasingly protective of speech, and particularly of “commercial speech,” or advertising, which can make it more difficult to regulate certain marketing practices.

scholarly journals Infection rate models for COVID-19: Model risk and public health news sentiment exposure adjustments

PLoS ONE ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (6) ◽  
pp. e0253381
Author(s):  
Ioannis Chalkiadakis ◽  
Hongxuan Yan ◽  
Gareth W. Peters ◽  
Pavel V. Shevchenko
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
United States ◽  
Health Policy ◽  
Public Health Policy ◽  
National Level ◽  
The United States ◽  
Model Risk ◽  
Health News ◽  
News Reporting ◽  
Force Of Infection

During the COVID-19 pandemic, governments globally had to impose severe contact restriction measures and social mobility limitations in order to limit the exposure of the population to COVID-19. These public health policy decisions were informed by statistical models for infection rates in national populations. In this work, we are interested in modelling the temporal evolution of national-level infection counts for the United Kingdom (UK—Wales, England, Scotland), Germany (GM), Italy (IT), Spain (SP), Japan (JP), Australia (AU) and the United States (US). We model the national-level infection counts for the period January 2020 to January 2021, thus covering both the pre- and post-vaccine roll-out periods, in order to better understand the most reliable model structure for the COVID-19 epidemic growth curve. We achieve this by exploring a variety of stochastic population growth models and comparing their calibration, with respect to in-sample fitting and out-of-sample forecasting, both with and without exposure adjustment, to the most widely used and reported growth model, the Gompertz population model, often referred to in the public health policy discourse during the COVID-19 pandemic. Model risk as we explore it in this work manifests in the inability to adequately capture the behaviour of the disease progression growth rate curve. Therefore, our concept of model risk is formed relative to the standard reference Gompertz model used by decision-makers, and then we can characterise model risk mathematically as having two components: the dispersion of the observation distribution, and the structure of the intensity function over time for cumulative counts of new infections daily (i.e. the force of infection) attributed directly to the COVID-19 pandemic. We also explore how to incorporate in these population models the effect that governmental interventions have had on the number of infected cases. This is achieved through the development of an exposure adjustment to the force of infection comprised of a purpose-built sentiment index, which we construct from various authoritative public health news reporting. The news reporting media we employed were the New York Times, the Guardian, the Telegraph, Reuters global blog, as well as national and international health authorities: the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, the United States Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, and the World Health Organisation. We find that exposure adjustments that incorporate sentiment are better able to calibrate to early stages of infection spread in all countries under study.

scholarly journals Promising Agents for Chemoprevention of Skin Cancer

2006 ◽  
Vol 13 (5) ◽  
pp. 185-186
Author(s):  
S. P. Stratton ◽  
M. S. Stratton ◽  
D. S. Alberts
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
United States ◽  
Skin Cancer ◽  
Health Problem ◽  
Public Health Problem ◽  
The United States ◽  
Northern Europe ◽  
Significant Public Health Problem ◽  
The World ◽  
Significant Public Health

Skin cancer presents a significant public health problem because of its increasing incidence in the United States, Australia, Northern Europe, and other temperate climates around the world. [...]

scholarly journals Thoughts on Drug Policy, Public Health, and Crime: More Support for Decriminalization

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Douglas Husak
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
United States ◽  
Drug Use ◽  
Health Problem ◽  
Drug Policy ◽  
Public Health Problem ◽  
The United States ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
The Status ◽  
Drug Problems

In this paper I describe the nature of my interest in drug policy; discuss questions about whether and why drugs pose a public health problem; present some empirical results that bear on whether drug proscriptions might be justified because of their causal role in contributing to crime; hazard a few observations about how a society should deal with drug problems; and comment on the recent opiate epidemic plaguing much of the United States. My overall conclusion is that a good rationale for drug prohibitions has yet to be found, and the liberal alternative to criminalization, which recommends that drug use be treated as a public health problem, is problematic as well---even though it certainly would be an improvement on the status quo. 

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