Future healthcare journal最新文献

The alcohol industry plays a major role in global public health harm, and shapes policies and public perceptions to its benefit, through misinformation, lobbying and self-regulation. This article describes the alcohol industry's conflicts of interest, particularly in the dissemination of misleading health information, its role in school-based alcohol 'education', and its resistance to evidence-based harm reduction measures. The industry's activities contribute to a 'pollution pathway' that normalises alcohol consumption while obscuring its links to cancer, cardiovascular disease, fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASD) and other harms. Alcohol industry-funded organisations, such as Drinkaware, omit and distort the evidence on health risks and seek to shift the responsibility for harm onto consumers. Drawing parallels with the tobacco industry, we argue for stricter regulation, exclusion of the alcohol industry from health policymaking, and stronger public awareness campaigns to counter alcohol industry misinformation. Urgent action is needed to protect public health from alcohol industry influence and to mitigate alcohol-related harm.

Multinational conglomerates and other major food corporations dominate food options in the UK. At Bite Back, a youth-led movement, we have extensively documented the ways in which big food businesses target children as part of their market monopoly. These businesses employ tactics such as misleading health claims, advertising incessantly, promoting junk food every chance they get, as well as excluding young people from critical discussions about public health and reflections on their own impact. However, their negligence extends beyond individual wellbeing. Our research uncovered their significant contribution to environmental degradation, with many of these corporations responsible for alarming levels of carbon emissions. This article explores the dangerous liaisons between multinational conglomerates and the health of the public and the planet. This article also aims to show what youth-led activism looks like in a system rigged against young people, particularly in the face of such powerful and influential businesses.

As young people, alcohol, tobacco, vapes and fast food are everywhere in our lives. They are commonplace at social events, in our media, and in adverts; explained away as part of growing up. Many young people are unaware of the health risks of these substances, partly due to the success of industry marketing. For example, most people are aware of the risks to their livers from drinking alcohol, but far fewer of us realise the small scale of consumption required. The rise of vaping and fast food in particular has been accelerated by their low cost and widespread availability. As teenagers, most of us have limited spending power - our income comes from Saturday jobs or a handful of hours of shift work, so processed foods are the easiest choice. Vapes are easily available on most high streets, and young people often pass shops that sell them on their way to school. Society's casual attitude towards these promotes more consumption and obscures the risks. Our social media feeds influence us all, in a myriad of ways, ranging from athletes promoting an ideal body image, to companies sponsoring adverts for their products, to influencers casually showing alcohol, smoking and vaping as part of their regular lives. We explore solutions such as tighter regulations on packaging; clearer labelling of the risks of substances can help young people to make healthier, more informed decisions. We propose that vapes be subject to the same regulations as tobacco on storage, and mandating drab packaging; moving away from the bright, colourful designs that seem designed to target children specifically. Increasing the duty paid on these products could be beneficial, but it risks pushing consumers to potentially more risky alternatives, and further widens the socio-economic divide between rich and poor. We also suggest that teaching children to think critically from a young age will enable them to make better decisions about their health, as well as many other aspects of their lives.

The global pandemic of diet-related disease is increasingly recognised as commerciogenic - driven by financial incentives in the food system which drive the marketing and consumption of harmful food, including ultra-processed food (UPF). Despite international consensus on the harms of UPF and the adoption of precautionary policies by organisations such as WHO, UNICEF and governments in Latin America, UK policy response remains compromised by widespread conflicts of interest. These conflicts exist across government agencies, regulatory bodies, academia and media institutions, many of which are directly or indirectly funded by the food industry. Drawing parallels with tobacco control, the paper concludes that eliminating these conflicts is essential to formulating effective public health policy. Without structural change and the exclusion of industry actors from policymaking, rates of diet-related disease will continue to rise.

Modern pharmaceuticals represent some of the greatest achievements in science and economic development. Yet, despite significant progress, profound inequities in access to essential medicines persist, particularly in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Traditional market-driven pharmaceutical models have succeeded where strong commercial incentives exist, but have failed to deliver for diseases with limited market potential, particularly in the neglected tropical diseases. This article outlines the reasons for inequity within the current system, the role of not-for-profit pharmaceutical development, and the urgent need for a new, complementary model for access that centres on public health priorities rather than market return.

The pharmaceutical industry has been responsible for many interventions of great benefit to patients. However, great harm to patients and healthcare systems have been created through conflicts of interest, when the behaviours of individual doctors and healthcare systems have been compromised and patient harm has resulted. The interests of the pharmaceutical industry and the NHS cannot be assumed to overlap. This means that medical decision making should be as independent and unbiased as possible. Transparency about conflicts is important, but should be a means to the end it must be part of a system which stops conflicts harming patients and healthcare systems. Given the uncertainty of how the benefits of transparency can be used in practice, it is an imperative that conflicts are avoided, and not just 'managed'.

The increasing prevalence of non-communicable diseases (NCDs), caused by the consumption and use of unhealthy products, cannot be attributed to individual behaviours alone. The way that our world has changed in recent decades shows that the problem needs to be addressed through changes in policy rather than focusing solely on behaviour change. The efforts to reduce the harm caused by smoking over the past 50 years have given us a blueprint for how to reduce the harm caused by the tactics used by big industry to promote and sell harmful products. These commercial determinants of health (CDOH) can be countered by pre-exisitng powers at the local level, but we need national policy changes to help counter these CDOH more effectively.