Cite as: 509 U. S. 25 (1993)
Opinion of the Court
tect against prison conditions that merely threaten to cause health problems in the future, no matter how grave and imminent the threat.
We have great difficulty agreeing that prison authorities may not be deliberately indifferent to an inmate's current health problems but may ignore a condition of confinement that is sure or very likely to cause serious illness and needless suffering the next week or month or year. In Hutto v. Finney, 437 U. S. 678, 682 (1978), we noted that inmates in punitive isolation were crowded into cells and that some of them had infectious maladies such as hepatitis and venereal disease. This was one of the prison conditions for which the Eighth Amendment required a remedy, even though it was not alleged that the likely harm would occur immediately and even though the possible infection might not affect all of those exposed. We would think that a prison inmate also could successfully complain about demonstrably unsafe drinking water without waiting for an attack of dysentery. Nor can we hold that prison officials may be deliberately indifferent to the exposure of inmates to a serious, communicable disease on the ground that the complaining inmate shows no serious current symptoms.
That the Eighth Amendment protects against future harm to inmates is not a novel proposition. The Amendment, as we have said, requires that inmates be furnished with the basic human needs, one of which is "reasonable safety." DeShaney, supra, at 200. It is "cruel and unusual punishment to hold convicted criminals in unsafe conditions." Youngberg v. Romeo, 457 U. S. 307, 315-316 (1982). It would be odd to deny an injunction to inmates who plainly proved an unsafe, life-threatening condition in their prison on the ground that nothing yet had happened to them. The Courts of Appeals have plainly recognized that a remedy for unsafe conditions need not await a tragic event. Two of them were cited with approval in Rhodes v. Chapman, 452 U. S. 337, 352, n. 17 (1981). Gates v. Collier, 501 F. 2d 1291
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