Global Health with Justice: Controlling the Floodgates of the Upstream Determinants of Health through Evidence-Based Law

Applying a public health approach to identify priorities for regulating child product safety

OBJECTIVE

To identify leading injury risk factors and jurisdictional differences in Australian and US child-related product safety regulatory responses to inform the development of Australian policy and reform priorities.

METHODS

The study established and evaluated a knowledge base of child-related product safety regulatory responses (recalls, bans, standards and warnings) made in Australia and the US over the period 2011-17 to identify risk factors and potential regulatory gaps.

RESULTS

The research identified 1,540 Australian and US child-related product safety regulatory responses with the most common response type being product safety recall, and the leading product hazards in responses being choking, fire, fall, strangulation and chemical hazards. Jurisdictional differences identified potential regulatory gaps in Australia related to chemical hazards and high-risk durable infant and toddler products, and some data deficiencies in Australian responses.

CONCLUSIONS

Priorities include the need to improve the prevention orientation of the Australian product safety framework, to create an intelligence platform to assess injury risks more precisely and to address regulatory gaps related to the use of toxic chemicals in children's products and high-risk durable infant and toddler products. Implications for public health: The study demonstrates the identification of policy and reform priorities for child product safety using a public health lens.

Law, Virtue, and Public Health Powers

This article contributes to philosophical reflections on public health law by drawing on virtue jurisprudence, which rests on the straightforward observation that a political community and its laws will inevitably shape the character of its officials and subjects, and that an excellent character is indispensable to fulfilment. Thus, the law is properly set to encourage virtue and discourage vice. This opens a new perspective onto the ultimate purpose of public health law that is human flourishing. The means of pursuing this end is to entrust public health powers to officials to virtuously serve the common good, of which population health is one of its most important constituents, within the bounds of the law of the land. This article calls for the adoption of a Prudent Public Health Official standard into the law, in order to cultivate prudent, just, courageous and temperate characters in officialdom. Interestingly, this standard already chimes with certain pre-existing core principles of public health judicial doctrine in the USA, the European Union and the UK.