Introduction — The environment and public health goals hold a common value of healthy populations. The threat of bioterrorism requires a partnership of both, building upon the long history of the link between public health and the environment. This existing relationship is key to an effective system of biodefense for the nation, because the use of biological weapons through every environmental pathway poses a potential threat. Contamination of water, growing crops, grazing cattle, air through inhalation, dermal absorption, or consumption of food or water in the human environment are potential delivery methods. For these risks of bioterrorism in the environment, there is an existing federal regulatory and statutory framework upon which the relationship between the environment and public health can be strengthened and shaped. We took a narrower approach to public health priorities in the environment in 1962 with the publication of Silent Spring, which shifted the direct public health effects regulation to a broader environmental protection policy, which took a more comprehensive, holistic approach to human health.

This Article examines two important features of change in the post-9-11 relationship between public health, public health law, and environmental law. The first is an immediate change in the expansion of environmental laws to address biodefense activities of surveillance and response through either executive action or congressional amendment. The second and most pervasive change is the indication of a shift in federalism in public health law, in a way analogous to the development of federal environmental law in the last half of the twentieth century. This Article begins with an examination of the indications of a shift in federalism in public health, and then turns to the changing role of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (“EPA”) and the application of existing environmental laws to new problems and controversies in bioterrorism.

Citation: Environmental Law and Public Health Law – In a Time of Plague, 30 American Journal of Law and Medicine 217-236 (2004). This article examines the application of environmental law to the problems of bioterrorism preparation, surveillance and response, and the evolving mission of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.