Carriedo Angela, Otero-Alvarez Margarita, Levis Carmen
World Public Health Nutrition Association, London, UK.
University of Nevada, Reno, NV, USA.
Int J Health Policy Manag. 2024;13:8601. doi: 10.34172/ijhpm.8601. Epub 2024 Sep 15.
Bennett and colleagues' paper aims to synthesize the existing frameworks to identify and monitor unhealthy commodity industry's (UCI's) influence on health "to create a template surveillance system to be used by national governments across industries." In this commentary, we argue that to achieve a robust government-led national surveillance system, some challenges should be considered, such as () addressing power asymmetries between government and UCIs involved in policy-making, () evaluating competing interests among government constituencies to achieve policy coherence around health issues, and () contemplate whether governments rely on private or corporate donors and partners that may threaten financing and operationalization of the surveillance. Suggestions on how to overcome these challenges are beyond the scope of this commentary, but we discuss some cases of bottom-up approaches from organized groups aiming to hold UCIs accountable. We consider them to be emerging effective ways to support government-led initiatives and counter the long-lasting corporate power and negative impacts on public health.
贝内特及其同事的论文旨在综合现有框架,以识别和监测不健康商品行业(UCI)对健康的影响,“创建一个供各国政府跨行业使用的模板监测系统”。在这篇评论中,我们认为,要建立一个强有力的政府主导的国家监测系统,应考虑一些挑战,例如:(1)解决参与政策制定的政府与UCI之间的权力不对称问题;(2)评估政府各选区之间相互竞争的利益,以在健康问题上实现政策连贯性;(3)思考政府是否依赖可能威胁监测资金和运作的私人或企业捐助者及合作伙伴。关于如何克服这些挑战的建议超出了本评论的范围,但我们讨论了一些有组织团体采取的自下而上方法的案例,这些团体旨在让UCI承担责任。我们认为它们是支持政府主导举措、对抗长期存在的企业权力及其对公众健康负面影响的新兴有效方式。