The Traditional Definition of Pandemics, Its Moral Conflations, and Its Practical Implications: A Defense of Conceptual Clarity in Global Health Laws and Policies

• Published in: Cambridge quarterly of healthcare ethics Vol. 29; no. 2; pp. 205 - 217
• Main Author: DE Campos, Thana C
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States Cambridge University Press 01.04.2020
• Subjects: Bioethics; Criteria; Dictionaries; Disease; Emergencies; Emergency preparedness; Epidemics; Epidemiology; Field study; Global health; Infectious diseases; Medical ethics; Noncommunicable diseases; Pandemics; Public health; Semantics; Severity; global health; communicable diseases; global health emergencies; conflation problem; pandemics; definition of pandemics
• ISSN: 0963-1801; 1469-2147
• DOI: 10.1017/S0963180119001002

This paper argues that the existing definition of pandemics is not nuanced enough, because it is predicated solely on the criterion of spread, rather than on the criteria of spread and severity. This definitional challenge is what I call 'the conflation problem': there is a conflation of two different realities of global health, namely global health emergencies (i.e., severe communicable diseases that spread across borders) and nonemergencies (i.e., communicable or noncommunicable diseases that spread across borders and that may be severe). To put this argument forth, this paper begins by discussing the existing and internationally accepted definition of pandemics, its requirements, as well as its strengths (section 1). Section 2 then considers the problem with the standard definition of pandemics (i.e., the conflation problem) and some examples of it. Finally, section 3 evaluates some practical implications of the conflation problem to then explore conceptual clarity as the adequate solution.