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What is an Epidemic?: Currents in Contemporary Bioethics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2021

Jonny Anomaly
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Type
JLME Column
Information
Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics , Volume 42 , Issue 3 , Fall 2014 , pp. 389 - 391
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics 2014

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References

The reason we cannot say precisely how many times the term is used is that many historians think parts of Hippocrates's book were, like the Bible, altered or written by later commentators.Google Scholar
Hippocrates, , Of the Epidemics, 400 BCE, available at <http://classics.mit.edu/Hippocrates/epidemics.html>(last visited August 1, 2014).(last+visited+August+1,+2014).>Google Scholar
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The case is admittedly different for children who lack the power (because of ignorance, immaturity, or parental oversight) to control their diet and exercise patterns. See Anomaly, J., “Is Obesity a Public Health Problem?” Public Health Ethics 5, no. 3 (2012): 216–221.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mark Rothstein has suggested (in correspondence) that just as many people misleadingly use medical terms to apply to non-medical events – an “epidemic of crime” – they also use non-medical terms to describe our efforts at promoting medical research, as occurs when politicians declare “war on cancer.” This is bound to happen as language evolves, but allowing scientific nomenclature to reflect the evolution of words in popular discourse can be dangerous, since it can impact funding priorities. A similar point about the increasingly vague use of “public health” is made in Rothstein, M., “Rethinking the Meaning of Public Health,” Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics 30, no. 2 (2002): 144–149.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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