The Politics of Public Health Advocacy:.

My focus in this paper is on the relative importance of collective actors--social movements, advocacy groups, health voluntary organizations, and the like--in Canadian as compared with U.S. public health policy making and implementation. In both countries, non-governmental organizations played critical--although differently structured--roles in development and implementation of tobacco-control policies. However, while policies and actions to limit HIV/AIDS in injection drug users originated at the grass-roots in the U.S. (and have been highly localized and often underground), advocacy groups in Canada have (until very recently) played little or no role in this domain; policy responses have been pushed primarily by local public health officials and funded by national, provincial, and local governments. Based on my analysis of these differences, I argue that collective action in response to disease threats is powerfully shaped by state structure (including both political structure and the structure of medical care) and by how the threat, and its actual and/or potential victims, are perceived by policymakers and the public. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]