Principles Responsible for Public Health Ethics - Research Paper Example

Much of the theme of the debate observed in the paper is centered on the principle of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Basically, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration spells out health and safety standards that operators of various labor outfits are expected to adhere to. The requirements of the health and safety standards are made up of several components and broad factors but the one that directly affects the public health policy of neurodevelopmental toxicity risks allowance has to do with the limits that the standards put on chemical exposure. In the absence of this, there are other standards that have to do with access to information for employees, and the application of personal protective equipment (Gardner, and Petit, 2006). Since the occupational safety and health administration, OSHA was introduced as the major guiding principle of the neurodevelopmental toxicity risk allowance, a lot has been achieved in terms of the degree of protection that is given to industry workers with regards and reference to the exposure that they usually had to harmful toxins (Brownrigg et al, 2010). Indeed, the most beneficiary group out of this has been the pregnant women.   

Historical Context of Public Health Principle

The antecedent of The Occupational Safety and Health Administration, OSHA was directly linked with the need to ensure that stakeholders who were manning the industrial reforms of the 1970s were duly protected in terms of their health and safety provisions (Gardner, and Petit, 2006). To this end, The Occupational Safety and Health Administration was formally launched on April 28, 1971, with the Occupational Safety Health becoming an Act and being known as the Occupational Safety Health Act or OSH Act. At the time, the commissioner in charge was George Guenther. Mr. Guenther was mandated with the role of ensuring that as part of the provisions of the act, there was a rapid training and development program for all stakeholders within the labor force (Oxford Economics, 2011). Consequently, it will be right to say that as the days went by, the usefulness of the OSH Act was expanded to include almost all aspects of the labor force where the need to adherence to basic health and safety provisions were necessary. To this end, a training institute was established, which was known as the OSHA Training Institute in 1972 to ensure that people from all corners of the industrial force had a fair representation of their health and safety needs captured in the overall training program. With time, specialization training programs were introduced when in 1978; the Susan Harwood Training Grant Program was established to give specialized attention to the need of reducing occurrences of hazards at the workplace. It has been with such spirit of assurance of health and safety practice that the current forms of public health policy ethics such as neurodevelopmental toxicity risks due to occupational exposure to industrial chemicals during pregnancy have come up.  

Issues of ethics or human rights on the Policy

As far as the generalized principles of ethics and human rights are concerned, a lot of questions and justifications can be raised for both the neurodevelopmental toxicity risk allowance and the occupational safety and health administration can be raised. In the first place, it can be observed that as much as the neurodevelopmental toxicity risk allowance ensures that as many workers of any industry as possible as not at risk to harmful exposure of toxins, some preferential treatment is given particularly to women and for that matter pregnant women. In terms of human rights, there are those who have a stronger feeling that the issue of equality before the law should take off the preferential treatment given to pregnant women whiles ensuring that their safety is also not compromised. Ultimately, what this implies is that the present standards that ensure that pregnant women are protected should be extended to other workers. In the absence of such equality, the ethical question of fairness and discrimination may be raised. In modern times also, some experts on health and safety have questioned the standards that have been set by the occupational safety and health administration in the regulation of standards for companies. This is because many have said that there has not been a perfect harnessing of the various components and perspectives of health and safety practices. Some of the conflicting parts have often been said to be the epidemiology perspective and the environmental determinant of health perspective which has hardly seen a cross-section in terms of implementation of policy (Brownrigg et al, 2010).