ChinaDaily USA reports that 87 Chinese cities will begin releasing hourly updates on air quality from New Year’s Day, taking the total number doing so to 161, the Ministry of Environmental Protection announced. Data from 449 monitoring stations across the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei area, the Yangtze River Delta and the Pearl River Delta will provide real-time updates on levels of sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide and PM2.5 — particles smaller than 2.5 microns in diameter that can damage the lungs. The move is a response to complaints by experts and citizens about pollution, ministry spokesman Tao Detian said.
Improper Use of Biocides in Food Industry Poses Risk to Public Health
Biocides used in food production at sub-lethal doses may be endangering public health by increasing antibiotic resistance in bacteria and enhancing their ability to form harmful biofilms, reports a new study published in Applied and Environmental Microbiology. Researchers found that biofilms boosted the risk of food contamination by providing a reservoir of microorganisms. They concluded that biofilm formation is a major virulence factor in human infections.
New Year’s Resolutions for a Healthier America
Each New Year, millions of Americans resolve to quit smoking, drink less alcohol and give up the high fat, sugar and salt diets that lead to expanding waistlines and higher risk of diabetes and heart disease. Sad to say, however, most resolvers fail to realize their goals. According to the US Centers for Disease Control, fewer than one in ten smokers wanting to quit in 2010 actually succeeded. For the 38 million adult Americans who report binge alcohol drinking, about 80 to 90% of those who try to stop can expect to relapse. About 45 million Americans go on a diet each year but 80% of dieters fail to lose weight and a third actually gain. Worse, almost 70% of US adults are now overweight or obese.
The cost of these failed New Year’s resolutions hurts not only the pride and well-being of those who try to make changes in their lifestyle. According to the World Health Organization, overconsumption of tobacco, alcohol and unhealthy food are main causes of the growing burden of premature deaths and preventable illnesses from chronic diseases like diabetes, heart disease, cancer and stroke in the United States and around the world. So why is so hard for us to give up the products that lead to early death, pain, and rising costs?
One main reason is that the big alcohol, food, and tobacco corporations that profit from this hyperconsumption have created a world where the easy choice is one that brings them profits, not the one that keeps us healthy. They load their products with the nicotine, alcohol, sugar and fat that appeal to our vulnerabilities to addiction and our craving for release from stress and anxiety. They market their products relentlessly, using every technology at their disposal to get under our cognitive radar so they can manipulate our own and our children’s most primitive fears and hopes. In 2012, the fast food industry spent $4.6 billion to advertise mostly unhealthy products, often targeting children and young people. It significantly increased use of internet advertising, allowing advertisers to bypass parental controls of television advertising. Alcohol, food and tobacco companies make their products ubiquitous, cheaper and easier to find than healthier alternatives. To add insult to injury, these corporations and their trade associations use their political clout and campaign contributions to undermine public policies that protect health or make healthier choices more available. For example, when the Obama Administration suggested voluntary standards to restrict advertising unhealthy food to children, a Reuters investigation last year found that the big food companies spent more than $175 million over three years lobbying to defeat the proposal.
Given this corporate effort to promote consumption of products associated with the country’s most serious health problems, it’s hardly surprising that so many of us aren’t able to fulfill our New Year’s resolution to live healthier lives. So this year, let’s try some new resolutions:
1. Elect a Congress more willing to stand up to the tobacco, food, and alcohol industries. In the 2012 election, these three industries contributed more than $60 million to Congressional candidates in expectation of advancing their objectives of less regulation and lower taxes. In 2014, let’s resolve to support candidates who pledge to put protecting our health ahead of protecting corporate profit.
2. Encourage our cities and towns to use their zoning power to make unhealthy products less ubiquitous. Research shows that a lower density of alcohol outlets leads to less problem drinking, and fewer fast food outlets make it easier for people to choose healthier food. Zoning laws were created more than a century ago to protect against earlier threats to health, such as polluted air and water, inadequate sanitation, and unsafe housing. Let’s now update our zoning rules to safeguard our communities against the promotion of alcohol, tobacco, and unhealthy food that cause today’s killer chronic diseases.
3. Encourage our mutual and pension funds, and our religious, hospital and university endowments, to stop investing in companies that profit from promoting diseases. Companies change their business practices when government regulation, consumer and investor pressure and market forces make it less profitable to stay the course than make changes. A few years ago CALPERS, the pension fund of California public employees, dropped all investments in tobacco. In 2014, let’s resolve to begin a grassroots campaign to reward companies that end health damaging practices, and take our business and investments away from those who don’t.
4. Support public health officials who seek to restore the visible hand of government to protect public health. Proponents of market-knows-best have raised the bogey man of the Nanny State to defeat efforts to restrict marketing of tobacco, alcohol, fast food and soda. But it’s Nanny Ronald McDonald, Nanny Marlboro and Nanny Budweiser that are trying to persuade our children and young people to consume sickening products. This year, let’s resolve to better protect our children from these bad nannies.
5. Require corporations to pay for the health consequences of what they sell. One important reason companies continue to profit from promoting unhealthy products is that they can avoid paying for the damage. Instead, they shift the costs for tobacco, alcohol and diet- related diseases to tax payers and consumers. By ending their ability to externalize these costs, new policies and laws could create incentives for companies to create healthier products.
As individuals, we have limited power to resist the pressure to consume the alcohol, tobacco and unhealthy foods that lead to early death and preventable illness. In 2014, let’s together resolve to create the environments and policies that make health the easy choice for all Americans.
Nicholas Freudenberg is Distinguished Professor of Public Health at the City University of New York School of Public Health and author of Lethal but Legal Corporations, Consumption and Protecting Public Health (Oxford, Feb. 2014).
For Drug Corporations, Aiding the Sick and Poor Is Bad Business
As Big Pharma Argues That Patents Fuel Innovation, Critics Say Drug Monopolies Must Go
Cross-posted from Common Dreams
A simply-worded headline in Monday’s New York Times crystallizes the often ignored tension between the proliferation of disease among the global poor and the interests of the for-profit pharmaceutical industry by declaring: “India’s Efforts to Aid Poor Worry Drug Makers.”
As the Times reports—much to the chagrin of the “business groups, legislators and drug makers in the United States”— India has increasingly challenged patent protections in order to care for their impoverished population by allowing the production of less costly, generic versions of numerous drugs.
Citing just once example, in a country where roughly half those diagnosed with breast cancer die from it, in part due to the soaring cost ($18,000 per treatment) of one of the most effective drugs, India’s pioneering stance against the world’s largest pharmaceutical corporations has the business “world watching” as the country strives to bring more affordable medicines to its people, especially the poor.
The New York Times reports:
India, which is one of the world’s leading producers of generic pharmaceuticals, has long viewed patent rights on medicines skeptically. It has already ruled invalid patents protecting exclusive sales of Novartis’s Gleevec, Pfizer’s Sutent and Roche’s Tarceva, all cancer medicines. In a landmark decision last year, the government agreed that the patent protecting Bayer’s Nexavar, also a cancer drug, was valid but overrode it anyway because a generic company promised to lower the price from $4,500 to about $140 per month of treatment.
Most recently, Roche Holdings of Switzerland has surrendered the patent rights to the drug Herceptin, one of the most effective treatments for an aggressive form of breast cancer, after deeming they would lose a legal battle in Indian courts.
And, in a move expected to “create ripples around the world,” according to one Indian public health official, an Indian government committee is soon expected to announce the start of a formal process to set aside patents on 15 more medicines.
The Times continues:
For drug companies, the most worrisome aspect of India’s efforts to lower drug prices is that other countries are beginning to follow its lead. Both Indonesia and the Philippines recently adopted patent laws modeled on India’s, and legislators in Brazil and Colombia have proposed following suit.
“One of the concerns of the industry is not just what India is doing in India, but we realize that the whole world is watching India,” Amy Hariani of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce affiliate, the U.S.-India Business Council, which is fighting India’s patent policies, told the Times.
Critiquing the position represented by Hariani and the Times‘ presentation of the conflict being between the accessibility of generic drugs versus drug innovation, economist Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, proposed an alternative headline for the Times article: “U.S. Tries to Force India to Accept Medieval Patent Rules.”
One problem with the Times‘ framing of the patent issue, he notes, is the assumption that a government-imposed patent monopoly is the only effective structure for the development of life-saving drugs.
“The patent system for financing drug research both leads to bad health outcomes and is a substantial drag on growth and job creation,” Baker writes on the CEPR blog Beat the Press.
He continues:
There are other more modern mechanisms for financing research than this relic from the feudal guild system. For example, Nobel laureate Joe Stiglitz has advocated a prize system whereby innovators are compensated for breakthroughs from a public prize fund and then the patent is placed in the public domain so that the drug can be freely produced as a generic. It is also possible to simply fund the research up front, as is already done to a substantial extent with the $30 billion a year provided to the National Institutes of Health.
If we eliminated monopolies it would both reduce the cost of drugs and also likely lead to better medicine.
Auto Industry Should Embrace Mileage and Emissions Standards
In a commentary in Poststar.com, Dan Becker and James Gerstenzanga from the safe Climate Campaign note that one year after automakers began building cars to meet tough new mileage and emissions requirements, it is clear the new standards are working. They report that an in-depth assessment by the Environmental Protection Agency found manufacturers are on track to deliver a fleet by 2025 that will cut in half the global-warming pollution of cars and save Americans billions of dollars at the pump.
Lessons from UK News Coverage of Alcohol Minimum Unit Pricing Advocacy
In May 2012, Scotland passed the Alcohol (Minimum Pricing) Bill. A new report in Social Science and Medicine examines the dynamic interplay between alcohol industry and advocacy claims-makers in this campaign. The study offers several lessons for promoting policies in the media. First, it may be useful to shift focus away from young binge drinkers and heavy drinkers, towards population-level over-consumption. Secondly, advocates might focus on presenting the policy as part of a wider package of alcohol policies. Thirdly, emphasis on the success of recent public health policies could help portray the UK and Scotland as world leaders in tackling culturally embedded health and social problems through policy.
Corporations and Health Watch 