Commercial Determinants of Health and the WHO: Conflicts of Interest at the New WHO Foundation

Alcohol Issues Podcast - Episode 16

Commercial Determinants of Health and the WHO: Conflicts of Interest at the New WHO Foundation

Movendi International's weekly in-depth conversation about latest alcohol issues in policy and science and new alcohol industry revelations.

Welcome to the Alcohol Issues Podcast and our 16th episode. This week we focus on commercial determinants of health and the World Health Organization, zooming in on conflicts of interest at the new WHO Foundation and shedding light on the broader context of the corporate objectives of health harmful industries such as Big Alcohol and Big Junk Food.

Discussing the global governance of health and corporate interference

For the 16th episode of the Alcohol Issues Podcast host Maik Dünnbier welcomes Professor Jeffrey Collin and Dr Nason Maani.

Jeff Collin is Professor of Global Health Policy at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, UK. A political scientist by background, he previously worked at the London school of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. Moving to Edinburgh in 2005, he established a suite of MSc programmes in health policy, joining the School of Social & Political Science in 2010 when the Global Public Health Unit was created within Social Policy.

Nason Maani was most recently a 2019-2020 Harkness Fellow at the Boston University School of Public Health and an Assistant Professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. He is focused on the structural and commercial determinants of health. Nason also serves as advisor to the Boston University/Rockefeller 3D commission on Data, Determinants and Decision-making.

They are two of the authors of a very timely, important and high profile scientific commentary published in February in BMJ Global Health.

Their commentary is called “The New WHO Foundation — Global Health Deserves Better” and has received much attention, especially among civil society and community groups dealing with the effects of health harmful industries interfering in public health policy making, particularly in the areas of Non-Communicable Diseases and their risk factors.

In the conversation, they discuss the topic of global health governance, the importance of WHO’s independence and the challenges posed by commercial determinants of health.

They analyze key conflict of interest issues that threaten the credibility and norm-setting function of the World Health Organization.

This topic is brought into sharp focus by the newly created WHO Foundation and how it decides to treat the alcohol industry and other health harmful corporate giants, such as Nestle.

With Jeff and Nason, Maik discusses to what extent the recent debacle of the European Super League in football can serve as analogy to help understand key concerns around the WHO Foundation.

Nason and Jeff share profound insights into how health harmful corporations work and leverage donor relations to achieve their key corporate objectives.

They also look at the bigger picture. In the era of sustainable development, where NCDs and their risk factors, such as alcohol, are among the biggest obstacles to not only good health but sustainable development overall, conflicts of interest inherent in many partnerships and donor relations with commercial determinants of health pose serious threats to achieving NCDs and SDGs targets. Nason and Jeff explain how and why.

Resources for the conversation with Evan

You can follow Prof Jeffrey Collin's research output, here.

You can read more about Jeff's work, here.

You can follow Dr Nason Maani on Twitter, here.

You can see Nason's research activity and read more about his work, here.

You can read more about the WHO Foundation, here. 

For further reading, Movendi International's Science Digest covering the topic of Commercial Determinants of Health and covering Conflict of Interest issues.

Press release from 2015: AB InBev's corporate social responsibility campaign to "influence social norms and individual behavior" with $1 billion.

Feedback

For feedback, questions and suggestions of future topics, please get in touch with maik.duennbier@movendi.ngo.

You are most welcome to follow Movendi International and Maik Dünnbier on Twitter, too.