"It’s long been a dream of global health law researchers to look across nations to see how governments are approaching the same public health problems. LawAtlas can help realize the unfulfilled dream of WHO’s International Digest, informing decisions about public health laws by providing a forum to compare legal practices internationally — something that doesn’t really exist at the global level."
Benjamin’s story:
The project that we did was really the first effort to “internationalize” LawAtlas to look at laws across countries. In our work, we have captured a small subset of public health laws across a small subset of countries in a dataset — 25 countries in Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa — that meet the objectives of the Global Health Security Agenda (GHSA).
The World Health Organization once published health-related laws from its member countries, and would try to organize these laws in its International Digest of Health Legislation. This was great in theory, but it was hobbled almost immediately because it relied on governments to submit their legislation. Very few did.
It’s long been a dream of global health law researchers to look across nations to see how governments are approaching the same public health problems. LawAtlas can help realize the unfulfilled dream of WHO’s International Digest, informing decisions about public health laws by providing a forum to compare legal practices internationally — something that doesn’t really exist at the global level.
Now that we have started to compile national public health laws, we can begin to think through the next steps of legal epidemiology at a global level: What types of laws are most conducive to preventing disease and promoting health? Up till now, we haven’t had the research base of laws from which we could ask those empirical questions about how the law can improve global health. This is only the beginning.
Using LawAtlas and policy surveillance methods, we would like to look beyond the GHSA and beyond the 25 countries in this study to examine a much wider range of health issues across all the countries in the world – allowing us to see differences across regions, health issues, government systems and institutional structures, which is helpful in understanding what types of legal structures can best improve the public’s health.
My hope is that in the years to come, some of the legal epidemiology successes with LawAtlas at the domestic level can be replicated in international and comparative public health law surveillance.
Benjamin Mason Meier has published his initial research on national laws that meet the objectives of the Global Health Security Agenda in the Medical Law Review. He is an associate professor of global health policy at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.
