Public Health Legislation

the laws issued by government and administrative organs that establish the requirements and standards for environmental protection, for working and living conditions, and for public health epidemiologic services.

The content and nature of public health legislation are determined by the state and social systems and the needs of the population in regard to health protection. In the capitalist countries this type of legislation is primarily punitive in nature and is directed at the violators of public health requirements. Public health acts have been issued in a number of countries, for example, the Public Health Act of 1875 in Great Britain and the Law on the Protection of Public Health of 1902 in France; additions and changes were later added to these laws. These old legislative enactments, however, do not ordinarily take into account modern advances in hygiene, epidemiology, and engineering and cannot guarantee the protection of the public’s health.

In prerevolutionary Russia public health requirements and rules were not adequately regulated. The basic questions of health protection and the sanitation and improvement of bodies of water and populated areas were not regulated at all. Therefore, the program of the RCP(B) that was adopted at the Eighth Congress in 1919 envisioned the “establishment of public health legislation.”

In the USSR public health legislation reflects the challenges that face the socialist state in the area of health protection. Soviet public health legislation defines the conditions and requirements that are mandatory for all ministries, organizations, enterprises, institutions, and private citizens and that are both aimed at protecting the population against the effects of harmful environmental and production factors and at preventing diseases, especially those that are infectious. Public health legislation is based on the Basic Principles of Health Legislation of the USSR and Union Republics, which was enacted in 1969. These principles include laws on the planning and improvement of populated areas, on environmental protection, on the construction and use of residential buildings, industrial enterprises, municipal structures, and school and preschool institutions, on the protection of labor, and on questions of the organization, structure, and activities of the public health epidemiologic service.