Historical Epidemics & Modern Public Health Care
Jonsen and Stryker (1993) argue that both historically and in modern timeÆs epidemics have been responsible for having a monumental impact on the following social institutions:
Clinical research and drug regulation
The impact of historical epidemics on the public health system and public health care policy has been significant in developing responses to epidemics that are routinely incorporated into modern public health care policy and protocols. While some aspects of this impact on public health care, like increased research to find medicines or vaccines, are still included in modern health care policy, others are not. For example, quarantines were used historically during epidemics. Many individuals originally promoted the idea of quarantining AIDS victims over fear of the disease when it first erupted in the U.S. Such policies were not implemented, but historically they often were. This analysis will discuss the impact of historical epidemics on different aspects of modern public health care policy and protocols.
When the AIDS epidemic erupted in the U.S. in the early 1980s, the disease was often related to historical epidemics, particularly the bubonic plague or Black Death that devastated Europe in the fourteenth century. Historical epidemics of the past have affected not only manÆs thinking about man, but they have also had a lasting impact on modern attitudes and institutions regarding epidemics. As Jonsen and Stryker (1993) argue, ô[epidemics] also left social institutions that sometimes affect present-day thinking about the AIDS epidemics. Cholera, for example, left a public health approach to epidemic disease that stressed quarantine; venereal diseases gave rise to the public health approach of contact tracing,ö (5-6). Despite the lasting affect of such policies, when proposals to apply them to the AIDS epidemic were proposed they created enormous co...