Park Mijeong
Office of Policy Development for Healthy Society, College of Medicine, Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea.
Epidemiol Health. 2017 Jul 25;39:e2017033. doi: 10.4178/epih.e2017033. eCollection 2017.
This study examines recently revised Korean government legislation addressing global infectious disease control for public health emergency situations, with the aim of proposing more rational, effective and realistic interpretations and applications for improvement of law.
The Korea reported its first laboratory-confirmed case of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) coronavirus on May 20, 2015. Since the first indexed case, Korean public health authorities enforced many public health measures that were not authorized in the law; the scope of the current law was too limited to cover MERS. Korea has three levels of government: the central government, special self-governing provinces, and si/gun/gu. Unfortunately, the Infectious Disease Control and Prevention Act does not designate the specific roles of each level of government, and does not state how these governmental branches should be vertically integrated in a state of emergency.
When thinking about these policy questions, we should be especially concerned about introducing a new act that deals with all matters relevant to emerging infectious diseases. The aim would be to develop a structure that specifies the roles of each level of government, and facilitates the close collaboration among them, then enacting this in law for the prevention and response of infectious disease.
To address this problem, after analyzing the national healthcare infrastructure along with the characteristics of emerging infectious diseases, we propose the revision of the relevant law(s) in terms of governance aspects, emergency medical countermeasure aspects, and the human rights aspect.
本研究审视了韩国政府近期修订的针对突发公共卫生事件全球传染病控制的立法，旨在提出更合理、有效和现实的解释及应用，以完善法律。
2015年5月20日，韩国报告了首例实验室确诊的中东呼吸综合征（MERS）冠状病毒病例。自首例索引病例出现以来，韩国公共卫生当局实施了许多法律未授权的公共卫生措施；现行法律的范围过于有限，无法涵盖MERS。韩国有三级政府：中央政府、特别自治省以及市/郡/区。遗憾的是，《传染病防治法》未明确各级政府的具体职责，也未说明在紧急状态下这些政府部门应如何进行纵向整合。
在思考这些政策问题时，我们应特别关注引入一项处理与新发传染病相关所有事项的新法案。目的是建立一个明确各级政府职责并促进它们之间密切协作的架构，然后将其立法以预防和应对传染病。
为解决这一问题，在分析国家医疗基础设施以及新发传染病特征之后，我们从治理层面、紧急医疗对策层面和人权层面提出相关法律的修订建议。
