Nonsmokers-only hiring policies: personal liberty vs. promoting public health

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Wendell C. Taylor ◽  
William J. Winslade
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Personal Liberty ◽  
Hiring Policies

scholarly journals The Fine Line: Rural Justice, Public Health and Safety, and the Coronavirus Pandemic

2021 ◽  
pp. 000276422110031
Author(s):  
Jennifer Sherman ◽  
Jennifer Schwartz
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Law Enforcement ◽  
Rural Communities ◽  
Health And Safety ◽  
Criminal Activity ◽  
Personal Liberty ◽  
Local Law Enforcement ◽  
Local Law ◽  
Sheriff's Department ◽  
Public Health And Safety

In this article, we provide an early glimpse into how the issues of public health and safety played out in the rural United States during the coronavirus pandemic, focusing on Washington State. We utilize a combination of news articles and press releases, sheriff’s department Facebook posts, publicly available jail data, courtroom observations, in-depth interviews with those who have been held in rural jails, and interviews with rural law enforcement staff to explore this theme. As elected officials, rural sheriffs are beholden to populations that include many who are suspicious of science, liberal agendas, and anything that might threaten what they see as individual freedom. At the same time, they expect local law enforcement to employ punitive measures to control perceived criminal activity in their communities. These communities are often tightly knit, cohesive, and isolated, with high levels of social support both for community members and local leaders, including sheriffs and law enforcement. This complex social context often puts rural sheriffs and law enforcement officers in difficult positions. Given the multiple cross-pressures that rural justice systems faced in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, we explore the circumstances in which they attempted to protect and advocate for the health and safety of both their incarcerated and their nonincarcerated populations. We find that certain characteristics of rural communities both help and hinder local law enforcement in efforts to combat the virus, but these characteristics typically favor informal norms of social control to govern community health. Thus, rural sheriff’s departments repeatedly chose strategies that limited their abilities to protect populations from the disease, in favor of appearing tough on crime and supportive of personal liberty.

scholarly journals Toxicity and verbal aggression on social media: Polarized discourse on wearing face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 205395172110235
Author(s):  
Paola Pascual-Ferrá ◽  
Neil Alperstein ◽  
Daniel J Barnett ◽  
Rajiv N Rimal
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Social Media ◽  
The United States ◽  
Verbal Aggression ◽  
Vaccine Uptake ◽  
Public Health Agencies ◽  
Personal Liberty ◽  
Public Health Professionals ◽  
Health Agencies ◽  
Governmental Institutions

Medical and public health professionals recommend wearing face masks to combat the spread of the coronavirus disease of 2019 (COVID-19). While the majority of people in the United States support wearing face masks as an effective tool to combat COVID-19, a smaller percentage declared the recommendation by public health agencies as a government imposition and an infringement on personal liberty. Social media play a significant role in amplifying public health issues, whereby a minority against the imposition can speak loudly, perhaps using tactics of verbal aggression taking the form of toxic language. We investigated the role that toxicity plays in the online discourse around wearing face masks. Overall, we found tweets including anti-mask hashtags were significantly more likely to use toxic language, while tweets with pro-mask hashtags were somewhat less toxic with the exception of #WearADamnMask. We conclude that the tensions between these two positions raise doubt and uncertainty around the issue, which make it difficult for health communicators to break through the clutter in order to combat the infodemic. Public health agencies and other governmental institutions should monitor toxicity trends on social media in order to better ascertain prevailing sentiment toward their recommendations and then apply these data-driven insights to refine and adapt their risk communication messaging toward mask wearing, vaccine uptake, and other interventions.

An Overview of Ethics and How Public Health Does Its Work

2019 ◽  
pp. 57-62
Author(s):  
Holly A. Taylor
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Public Health System ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The United States ◽  
Health Interventions ◽  
Health Law ◽  
Health It ◽  
Personal Liberty ◽  
Federal Organizations ◽  
Health And Well Being

Modern public health in the United States is conducted by a network of private, public, local, state, tribal, and federal organizations, agencies, individuals, and communities. The ethical mandate of public health has always been to protect and promote the health and well-being of the population. This chapter introduces the ways in which public health actors work to achieve those goals, and how their efforts can be squared with the quintessential American value of personal liberty, as well as with the increasing recognition of the importance of justice as a foundation for public health. It also provides chapter overviews for the related section of The Oxford Handbook of Public Health Ethics, which includes chapters on the ethics and public health system, public health interventions, and public health law and regulation.

Public Health and Newborn Hearing Screening

1997 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-16
Author(s):  
Terrey Oliver Penn ◽  
Susan E. Abbott
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Hearing Screening ◽  
Newborn Hearing Screening ◽  
Newborn Hearing
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