E-cigarettes: A framework for comparative history and policy.

Background: England, Australia and the United States have approached the regulation of e-cigarettes in very different ways, yet all three countries have appealed to the concept of evidence as underpinning policy responses. We compared these policy responses using a combination of the methodologies of historians and policy scientists in order to elucidate the factors that had influenced policy in each country.

Argument/analysis: Each country's evidence and values intersected in different ways, producing very different responses within specific national contexts and histories.

Vexing, Veiled, and Inequitable: Social Distancing and the "Rights" Divide in the Age of COVID-19.

Although unprecedented in scope and beyond all our life experiences, sweeping social distancing measures are not without historical precedent. Historically, racism, stigma, and discrimination resulted in grossly inequitable application of disease containment measures. But history also provides examples in which broad measures enjoyed remarkable public support.

Is Moderate Drinking Protective Against Heart Disease? The Science, Politics and History of a Public Health Conundrum.

Policy Points For more than 40 years, most research by epidemiologists, social scientists, and alcohol policy experts found that moderate alcohol consumption was cardioprotective. In the early 2000s, that consensus was shaken by new critics who subjected the previous research to vigorous methodological and empirical analysis, precipitating a bitter controversy, seemingly unresolvable despite numerous observational epidemiological studies. The effort to finally put that debate to rest through a large, multiyear randomized controlled trial under the aegis of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, generated external criticism and adverse newspaper coverage, particularly because the trial was largely funded by the alcohol industry, forcing National Institutes of Health leadership to abruptly terminate the study shortly after it started.

The E-Cigarette Debate: What Counts as Evidence?

Two major public health evaluations of e-cigarettes-one from the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), the other from Public Health England (PHE)-were issued back to back in the winter of 2018. While some have read these analyses as broadly consistent, providing support for the view that e-cigarettes could play a role in smoking harm reduction, in every major respect, they come to very different conclusions about what the evidence suggests in terms of public health policy. How is that possible? The explanation rests in what the 2 reports see as the central challenge posed by e-cigarettes, which helped to determine what counted as evidence.

The Two Faces of Fear: A History of Hard-Hitting Public Health Campaigns Against Tobacco and AIDS.

Fear is now commonly used in public health campaigns, yet for years ethical and efficacy-centered concerns provided a challenge to using fear in such efforts. From the 1950s through the 1970s, the field of public health believed that using fear to influence individual behavior would virtually always backfire. Yet faced with the limited effectiveness of informational approaches to cessation, antitobacco campaigns featured fear in the 1960s.

Future Perfect? The Future of the Social Sciences in Public Health.

This is a critical and perhaps unprecedented time for the social sciences in public health. While there are many opportunities for the social sciences to continue making transformative contributions to improve population health, there are significant challenges in doing so, particularly in a rapidly changing political landscape. Such challenges are both external (e.

Precision Medicine from a Public Health Perspective.

Over the past decade, precision medicine (PM) approaches have received significant investment to create new therapies, learn more about disease processes, and potentially prevent diseases before they arise. However, in many ways, PM investments may come at the expense of existing public health measures that could have a greater impact on population health. As we tackle burgeoning public health concerns, such as obesity, and chronic diseases, such as cancer, it is not clear whether PM is aligned with public health or in conflict with its goals.

The End of Written Informed Consent for HIV Testing: Not With a Bang but a Whimper.

In 2014, only two states in the United States still mandated specific written informed consent for HIV testing and, after years of controversy, New York ended this requirement, leaving only Nebraska. New York's shift to opt-out testing meant that a singular feature of what had characterized the exceptionalism surrounding HIV testing was eliminated. We trace the history of debates on written informed consent nationally and in New York State.

Means, ends and the ethics of fear-based public health campaigns.

Controversy has swirled over the past three decades about the ethics of fear-based public health campaigns. The HIV/AIDS epidemic provided a context in which advocacy groups were almost uniformly hostile to any use of fear, arguing that it was inherently stigmatising and always backfired. Although this argument was often accepted within public health circles, surprisingly, the bioethicists who first grappled with this issue in terms of autonomy and coercion in the 1980s were not single-minded: fear could be autonomy-enhancing.