Public Health Law & Policies: Definition & Examples

These laws aim to promote the common good through a phenomenon known as herd immunity. Herd immunity is a form of indirect protection from infectious disease for individuals who are not immune to an infection. Herd immunity occurs when a large proportion of the population is vaccinated against a disease, which disrupts chains of infection and thereby provides indirect protection for individuals who are not vaccinated.

Public health laws that focus on population health, such as school vaccination laws, are often quite controversial. This is because these laws often pit individual freedoms against the common good. In the case of school vaccination laws, the societal benefit of herd immunity comes at the cost of parents' individual freedom to object to vaccinating their children.

Although these strategies are quite diverse, they each reflect the underlying goals of public health law: preventing disease and injury and promoting population health. Many public health laws and policies apply multiple strategies to achieve these goals. For example, smoking bans are a form of regulation that alters the physical environment.

Public health law also has a distinct focus on population health, which is an approach to health that aims to improve the health of entire human populations. As a result, public health laws and policies are often intended to promote shared benefits for all or most members of a given community, known as the common good. This can sometimes lead to controversy when public health laws pit individual freedoms against the common good, such as with school vaccination laws.

Public health laws and policies apply many different kinds of strategies to achieve their goals. These strategies include:

• Taxation
• Altering the informational environment
• Altering the built or physical environment
• Altering the natural environment
• Regulation
• Deregulation