"Petition 329: A Legal Challenge to the Involuntary Confinement of TB Patients in Kenyan Prisons"

The tension between public health and individual rights raises key questions in the face of public health crises such as tuberculosis (TB) and Ebola: What are the circumstances that warrant the obligatory detention of individuals with an infectious disease as a measure of protecting the general public? What are the implications for the protection of privacy while managing and controlling the spread of diseases such as HIV? What must be done to obtain informed consent for research and epidemiological studies that benefit public health? Recent handling of TB and Ebola patients in West Africa captures the tensions inherent in the attempt to balance public health and individual rights. In this Perspective, we outline our experiences in handling Petition 329 of 2014, a constitutional petition filed in the High Court of Kenya in 2010, which sought to challenge the arrest and detention of two TB patients for interrupting their TB treatment.