Okay, All You Esquires, Economists and Wonks....

[purejuice]

...riddle me this. I can sort of understand the more paranoid sovereign Tuskegee experiment reasons people might not want to submit to laws mandating innoculations.

First of all, are there such laws? Must I inoculate my children against measles, pox, and everything else?

Second, is there case law, actual precedents, in which someone has been held liable for spreading or carrying disease?

Comments

[tigerflower]

Some localities and states have laws regarding public school attendance and immunization, yes, but as is the way of such things, it is not uniform in the USA. I seem to recall that the laws are more comprehensive in many other countries.

As for the second, about which I know a bit more: there have been various attempts, the most well known and wide-ranging that I know of being the infamous Contagious Diseases Acts in the UK (1864), which resulted in many hundreds of prostitutes and suspected prostitutes being imprisoned for periods of up to a year at a time in what were known as "Lock Hospitals" for being found (or suspected as) infected with "social disease."

More recently, it's been the case that many countries regard the transmission of disease -- often in practice it ends up being herpes or some other STI -- as part of tort law. HIV transmission, on the other hand, is more commonly treated under criminal law. I know there have been cases in Germany, Australia, the UK, the US, and Canada (the big case I know about there is R. v. Cuerrier, which was in the late 90s sometime if memory serves). The US, predictably, has a lot of conflicting legal stances on the issue and no comprehensive federal case law.

Does this help?

[purejuice]

yes, thank you. i am asking because i have joined OFA and will be working on its platform/messaging task force here in NM. health care access being something i can inform myself upon, and which is a winning political strategery.