Section effective July 1, 2024. See, also, § 44-1-140 effective until July 1, 2024.

(A) The Department of Public Health may make, adopt, promulgate, and enforce reasonable rules and regulations from time to time requiring and providing for:

(1) the thorough sanitation and disinfection of all passenger cars, sleeping cars, steamboats, and other vehicles of transportation in this State and all convict camps, penitentiaries, jails, hotels, schools, and other places used by or open to the public;

(2) the sanitation of hotels, restaurants, cafes, drugstores, hot dog and hamburger stands, and all other places or establishments providing eating or drinking facilities and all other places known as private nursing homes or places of similar nature, operated for gain or profit;

(3) the safety and sanitation in the harvesting, storing, processing, handling and transportation of mollusks, fin fish, and crustaceans;

(4) the safety, safe operation and sanitation of public swimming pools and other public bathing places, construction, tourist and trailer camps, and fairs;

(5) the care, segregation, and isolation of persons having or suspected of having any communicable, contagious, or infectious disease; and

(6) the thorough investigation and study of the causes of all diseases, epidemic and otherwise, in this State, the means for the prevention of contagious disease and the publication and distribution of such information as may contribute to the preservation of the public health and the prevention of disease.

(B) The department may make separate orders and rules to meet any emergency not provided for by general rules and regulations, for the purpose of suppressing nuisances dangerous to the public health and communicable, contagious, and infectious diseases and other danger to the public life and health.