Law as a tool in promoting and protecting public health: Always in our best interests?

For a long time, law has been an essential tool in the armoury of states for communicable disease control, authorizing interventions such as quarantine, detention, border control and surveillance deemed necessary for the protection of population health. Increasingly, law has come to play a role in the control of non-communicable disease, authorizing control of the lifestyle environment by means such as regulation of advertising and taxation of harmful products. The importance of law as a public health tool was re-inforced during the severe acquired respiratory syndrome (SARS) epidemic in 2003. The Hong Kong Legislative Council found that the absence of updated laws and the lack of knowledge of public health laws on the part of policy makers and public health consultants contributed significantly to the spread of SARS in Hong Kong.1 The World Health Organization (WHO) noted that effective control of the SARS outbreak relied more on traditional control measures embedded in legislation such as contact tracing and quarantine, than on modern medical technology.2 The experience of SARS was followed by revision of the WHO International Health Regulations to ensure the existence of international and ARTICLE IN PRESS /$ - see front matter & 2007 The Royal Institute of Public Health. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reser