Suchergebnisse

In June of 2001, the Supreme Court overturned a set of antitobacco measures adopted by the state of Massachusetts designed to protect young people from advertising. Once again, the court expressed its hostility toward measures designed to restrict commercial speech in the name of the social good. In so doing, the court underscored the enduring tension between the libertarian and social welfare dimensions of contemporary democracy and placed into relief the divisions within the American liberal tradition.

In the early and mid-1980s, when democratic nations were forced to confront the public health challenge posed by the epidemic of the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), it was necessary to face a set of fundamental questions: Did the history of responses to lethal infectious diseases provide lessons about how best to contain the spread of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection? Should the policies developed to control sexually transmitted diseases or other communicable conditions be applied to AIDS? If AIDS were not to be so treated, what would justify such differential policies?

In the mid-1980s public health officials in North America, Europe, Japan, and Australia discovered that almost half of the hemophiliac population, as well as tens of thousands of blood transfusion recipients, had been infected with HIV-tainted blood. This book provides a comparative perspective on the political, legal, and social struggles that emerged in response to the HIV contamination of the industrialized worlds blood supply. It brings together chapters on the experiences of the United States, Japan, France, Canada, Germany, Denmark, Italy, and Australia with four comparative essays that shed light on the cultural, institutional, and economic dimensions of the HIV/blood disaster.