Latent damage: how to raise health protection standards

The damage that is a consequence of the illegal act is not always immediately perceptible, but can evolve over the years with mild harm, grave harm, or sometimes even harm that is irremediably deleterious to the injured party. It follows that latent personal injury involves a limitation to the injured party’s exercise of the right to request compensation, at least as long as the alteration of the injured party’s state of health remains asymptomatic. This problem has emerged above all in reference to latent damages due to medical liability, infected blood products, or exposure to harmful products, which by their very nature are not immediately perceived by the injured party. Often, new techniques and new products are placed on the market without controls to lower the production costs. The lack of controls on materials, chemicals or drugs is increasingly common because the States save money and this causes a lowering of the level of health protection. The analysis concerns the solutions identified by the most recent judgments of the Italian and European Courts of justice, by interpreting “systematic axiological evolutionary” to demonstrate that the proposed solutions are different depending on the axiological system of values and the economic analysis of law. The different time limits in the exercises of rights to the inured party should be agreed upon, in particular, longer or more flexible times for the rights of the person to obtain the needed protection. The human health might prevail over the rest of the economic interests involved.