ABSTRACT
Domestic public health law, and responsibility for public health implementation, is fragmented. Public health legislation has developed as a collection of responses to individual health risks as they are recognised by health science, focused almost exclusively on the biological causes of disease to the exclusion of social causes. The body of public health law is composed of a complex and uncoordinated patchwork of technical rules aimed at individual sources of health risk, and representing a sociological and scientific approach to public health that is outdated. Enforcement of public health law falls to a wide range of disparate public bodies, and to the willingness of individuals and pressure groups to bear the costs of instituting legal action to protect public health interests. Public health legislation says little about most major contemporary public health concerns, in part because contemporary causes of ill health do not fit easily into the category of statutory nuisance. As public health legislation has not moved on from early 20th century nuisance jurisprudence, it has not been able to accommodate ill health that results from lifestyle. The nuisance premise of public health legislation is no longer workable. A new approach to the legal framework of maintenance of public health based on health standards, focusing on the right to health of the population rather than on premises and activities which threaten health, is long overdue.
