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The Traditional Definition of Pandemics, Its Moral Conflations, and Its Practical Implications: A Defense of Conceptual Clarity in Global Health Laws and Policies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 March 2020

THANA C. DE CAMPOS
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Abstract

This paper argues that the existing definition of pandemics is not nuanced enough, because it is predicated solely on the criterion of spread, rather than on the criteria of spread and severity. This definitional challenge is what I call ‘the conflation problem’: there is a conflation of two different realities of global health, namely global health emergencies (i.e., severe communicable diseases that spread across borders) and nonemergencies (i.e., communicable or noncommunicable diseases that spread across borders and that may be severe). To put this argument forth, this paper begins by discussing the existing and internationally accepted definition of pandemics, its requirements, as well as its strengths (section 1). Section 2 then considers the problem with the standard definition of pandemics (i.e., the conflation problem) and some examples of it. Finally, section 3 evaluates some practical implications of the conflation problem to then explore conceptual clarity as the adequate solution.

Keywords

pandemicsdefinition of pandemicsglobal healthglobal health emergenciescommunicable diseasesconflation problem
Type
Special Section: Causality and Moral Responsibility
Information
Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics , Volume 29 , Issue 2 , April 2020 , pp. 205 - 217
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2020

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Footnotes

Acknowledgements: The author is grateful to Mark Eccleston-Turner and Iain Brassington for comments on earlier drafts of the paper. Special thanks are due to Mary Clare Enright for critical feedback and proofreading, and to Tiffanie Cappello-Lee for her research assistance and many conversations on this topic.

References

Notes

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