Engagement between public health professionals and the commercial sector is increasingly common but remains contested. While many companies provide valuable products and services, some industries profit from products and practices that harm population health, creating inherent tensions for public health. This presentation will examine how certain industries seek to shape scientific evidence and public narratives to protect their commercial interests. It will also highlight a key vulnerability for harmful industries, presenting an opportunity for public health professionals to use collective action and digital platforms to drive meaningful change.

Harmful industries are key drivers of public health harms, and inequalities. As well as the driving the production of harmful products, these actors disseminate misinformation, interfere with policymaking, and increasingly engage in attacks on science and epidemiology, and on experts more generally. This talk will focus on the role of public health, and public health research, in holding these actors to account, and on the role of communities and the wider public in protecting public health and preventing harm. It will draw on examples from the tobacco, alcohol, food, gambling and other industries, and draw out some of the commonalities between them. It will also discuss how “upstream” and “downstream” approaches to prevention can be applied to the commercial determinants of health (CDOH) and help with developing effective measures to address CDOH-related harms.

This presentation will outline potential policy solutions that can be used to address excessive corporate power and incentivise business models for health. It will provide an overview of a broad range of policy solutions (including competition regulation, corporate law, and corporate reporting) and examples of where they have been applied.