CDC Seeks Controversial New Quarantine Powers To Stop Outbreaks
Professor Scott Burris appeared in this segment of NPR’s Morning Edition on February 2, 2017. Listen or Read Online
Author: Scott Burris
Why the C.D.C.’s Power to Quarantine Should Worry Us
By KYLE EDWARDS, WENDY PARMET and SCOTT BURRIS JAN. 23, 2017 The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued new regulations this month that give it broad authority to quarantine Americans. The rules outline for the first time how the federal government can restrict interstate travel during a health crisis, and they establish inhouse oversight of whether someone should be detained, without providing a clear and direct path to challenge a quarantine order in federal court. State and local authorities had previously been the ones to usually deal with issues like this during epidemics. Now the administration of Donald J. Trump has even more authority to detain people than the Obama administration had during the Ebola crisis. It’s imperative that whenever the next outbreak hits, emergency health measures are grounded in scientific evidence and guided by clear, fair rules to protect people from wrongful deprivation of their liberties. Consider what happened to Kaci Hickox three years ago, when she landed at Newark Liberty International Airport after volunteering as a nurse for Ebola patients in Sierra …
Working at the Intersection of Legal Practice and Science for the Public’s Health
If you’ve been up to the third floor of Barrack Hall in the past year, you may have run into some of our staff … lawyers, a few social scientists and communicators, toiling away in Suite 300. If you haven’t stopped in to ask what they’re doing, I encourage you to do so, because it’s exciting, and in many ways, revolutionary. Our work, essentially, supports the widespread adoption of scientific tools and methods for mapping and evaluating the impact of law on health. In 2009, we began as the National Program Office for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Public Health Law Research program under the Law School’s Center for Health Law, Policy and Practice, to make the case for laws that improve health. We were asked by RWJF to build the field and identify methods for researching the impact of laws and policies on health and wellbeing. As we started, we realized that it’s difficult to evaluate the impact of laws and policies on health if you don’t know what the laws and policies are, …
Can Kasich Declare An OD Emergency?
Professor Scott Burris is quoted in this Cincinnati Online article about calls for Ohio Governor John Kasich to declare a public health emergency in response to recent overdoses and concerns about addiction. Read the Full Article
Needle Exchange Debate Raises Prosecution Questions
Professor Scott Burris is quoted in this article on New Hampshire, which is considering a bill that would clear the way for needle exchange programs and decriminalize residual amounts of drugs in syringes when they are exchanged for clean ones. Currently, only five states explicitly exempt trace amounts of drugs from their controlled drug laws, according to Professor Scott Burris. Read the Full Story
WATCH: Chasing Heroin
Professor Scott Burris was interviewed as part of PBS Frontline’s look at the heroin crisis in America. Burris discussed the non-stereotypical heroin user, the emergence of drug courts, and the use of methadone as treatment for those addicted to opioids. Watch the Documentary
A Transdisciplinary Approach to Public Health Law: The Emerging Practice of Legal Epidemiology
A transdisciplinary model of public health law, linking both its legal and scientific elements, can help break down enduring cultural, disciplinary, and resource barriers that have prevented the full recognition and optimal role of law in public health. Public health law has roots in both law and science. For more than a century, lawyers have helped develop and implement health laws; over the last 50 years, scientific evaluation of the health effects of laws and legal practices has achieved high levels of rigor and influence. We describe an emerging model of public health law uniting these two traditions. This transdisciplinary model adds scientific practices to the lawyerly functions of normative and doctrinal research, counseling, and representation. These practices include policy surveillance and empirical public health law research on the efficacy of legal interventions and the impact of laws and legal practices on health and health system operation. Download the Paper at SSRN
Public Health Law Monitoring and Evaluation in a Big Data Future
Law is important to public health. It provides government health agencies with their jurisdiction and regulatory authority. Laws and regulations are routinely used in the name of health to regulate behavior and foster safer environments. More fundamentally, law’s influence in shaping everyday life and the socioeconomic and physical environments in which it unfolds has a powerful impact on both the level and distribution of health. Despite law’s importance, and despite the strong orientation toward scientific evaluation in public health, the study of the impact of laws and legal practices on health (“public health law research”) has been uneven. While research of the highest quality has been sustained in a few areas like auto safety and tobacco control, it has been infrequent or truncated in others, like gun control and HIV/AIDS. The research that has been supported is almost entirely aimed at evaluating deliberate legal interventions. Epidemiological research on unintended health effects of non-health laws has been almost entirely neglected. Overall, the national investment in rigorously separating the laws that help from the laws that hurt has …
Measuring America’s Opioid Problem
Professor Scott Burris is quoted in this article by Aljazeera America on America’s heroin crisis and its changing drug policy. Burris weighs in on state syringe laws, which are varied and complicated. Read the Full Story
Charlie Sheen Is HIV-Positive – Can He Really Be Sued?
Professor and Director of the Center for Health Law, Policy and Practice Scott Burris is quoted in this article by People.com about actor Charlie Sheen, who recently stated that he is HIV positive. Could his former sexual partners sue him? Read the Article.
