Salagay O.O. Infectious disease control in the European Union: legal retrospective and modernity

Abstract: This work focuses on the protection of population from infectious diseases in Europe, including modern approaches to infection control in the European Union. Plague, smallpox, cholera and other infectious diseases followed European history for centuries, killing millions of people. This forced the people to seek out solutions, often intuitive methods of countering the effects of the diseases. Many of these methods later turn mandatory and converted into anti-epidemic measures, some of which are still widely used today. The genesis of these measures in Europe, as well as modern legal aspects of fighting against infectious diseases in the European Union is in the focus of this article. The research methodology is based on the use of general theoretical methods, including logical generalization, analysis, and special legal methods, including formal-legal method. In this article, the author for the first time investigates development of the law of the European Union on regulatory control of communicable diseases in historical retrospective, and describes the actual content of relevant regulations of the EU. Many of the acts cited in this work have never been translated into Russian or analyzed in the Russian legal literature before. The author analyzes the content of these legal norms and draws conclusions about EU's current system for countering threats of biological origin.

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