Reforming harmful corporate practices to protect the public's health: An important strategy for the twenty first century

There are many public health problems for which a causal role could be attributed to harmful industry or corporate practices. Most obvious are occupational illnesses, illness arising from environmental pollution, and tobacco-related disease. Current public health efforts aimed at the tobacco, food, and beverage industries potentially presage a growing focus within the field on reforming and influencing corporate practices to achieve improvements in population health.

Explicit discussion of the role of corporate practices in influencing the public's health has become more commonplace. Anti-tobacco activists, historians, and occupational health researchers have all helped to expose common industry strategies to influence science, public opinion, and the regulatory process to maintain markets for harmful or deadly products. Some researchers have developed conceptual frameworks for understanding harmful corporate practices and how they impact health, and have argued that addressing such practices is an important pathway for improving the public's health. Others have called for greater linkages between public health and anti-corporate movements, and training public health researchers and practitioners to focus on corporate practices as a determinant of health.

This presentation will review recent scholarship regarding corporate practices and their impact on health, examine the domains in which corporate practices have been linked to health impacts, explore others, and discuss the importance of such a focus for public health research and practice in the twenty first century. I will also discuss some of the pitfalls and challenges of such an approach.