ABSTRACT
This chapter presents pathology of public health securitism in order to outline the causes, processes, and consequences of this seminal development for the world of public health policy. It examines three pandemics through the focus provided by analysing the different ways of defining how public health and security relate to each other. These pandemics are the continuing HIV/AIDS pandemic, mounting fears about pandemic influenza, and the growing global spread of tobacco-related diseases. These case studies shed light on how approaching pandemics as security threats illustrates the current and future importance of public health securitism for public health governance. These practical, tactical, and strategic processes do not mesh into each other to produce a harmonised process that generated public health securitism. Each individually contributed to the politics that has gradually led to public health securitism's emergence. Limiting public health securitism to communicable diseases would also provide a bright-line rule for distinguishing what public health problems should be accorded security status.
