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American Public Health Association
133rd Annual Meeting & Exposition
December 10-14, 2005
Philadelphia, PA
APHA 2005
 
Session: Regulation and Its Discontents: The History and Ethics of Public Health Surveillance
4323.0: Tuesday, December 13, 2005: 4:30 PM-6:00 PM
Oral
Regulation and Its Discontents: The History and Ethics of Public Health Surveillance
Public health departments collect a vast array of personally identifiable information in the course of disease notification efforts. These undertakings span a range of conditions from infectious threats, chronic diseases including cancer, immunization status, to birth defects. Advocates for expanded surveillance would extend the practice to occupational diseases and, most ambitiously, to profiles of childhood health status. In the one Constitutional case addressing public health surveillance to be heard by the Supreme Court, a unanimous tribunal upheld notification. HIPAA regulations, as well, explicitly provides for a “carve out” for public health surveillance. By law and regulation, public health departments are required to provide strict measures of protection to guarantee the security of identifiable information. Although challenges have been raised to the adequacy of such measures, there has been little debate about their centrality to the preservation of the legitimacy of surveillance activities. Less clear is the question of the limits that might be imposed on health departments once they obtain personally identifiable information. May identifiable public health data be used for traditional public health practices such as contact tracing? May they be relied upon as the foundation for public health research? May they be used for public health purposes secondary to the initial justification for their collection? Finally, may they be shared among and between health departments and agencies? In this panel, we will discuss two cases in which there has been controversy over the release of public health data before turning to the larger question of what constitutes appropriate regulation in the context of public health surveillance.
Learning Objectives: 1. Discuss contemporary controversies regarding the use of personally identifiable data 2. Discuss ethical and regulatory frameworks governing the use of personally identifiable data that does not clearly fall within the scope of human subjects research
Organizer(s):Amy Fairchild
Presider(s):Amy Fairchild
4:30 PMCan Public Health Share Data with the Community: The Case of the Illinois Cancer Registry
Ronald Bayer, PhD
4:50 PMCan Public Health Share Data with Law Enforcement?
Mark Barnes, JD, LLM
5:10 PMCan Public Health Regulate Itself? Lessons from Medicine  [ Recorded presentation ]
Sydney Halpern, PhD
See individual abstracts for presenting author's disclosure statement and author's information.
Organized by:Medical Care
CE Credits:CME, Health Education (CHES), Nursing

The 133rd Annual Meeting & Exposition (December 10-14, 2005) of APHA