Laura C. Leviton, Carolyn E. Needleman, Maurice A. Shapiro - Confronting Public Health Risks: A Decision Maker's Guide

How might tensions between scientists? research goals and the community?s service goals be reconciled? Who decides where the public interest lies? What kind of professional intervention best promotes social justice? Public health risks are often shared by a community but go unrecognized until some event precipitates change. Written to help public health and environmental protection professionals and students plan and cope with the social complexity of working with communities threatened by serious health hazards, Confronting Public Health Risks provides case examples and specific tools for analyzing and dealing with such predicaments. While many case studies of risk intervention deal only with a brief moment in the history of the problem, leaving the impression that the issue arose quickly and was resolved after the period studied, the six cases presented here (two from environmental health, two from occupational health, and two from the AIDS epidemic) all cover a long time span so that readers can track ho