Background:As a highly contagious disease, the COVID-19 pandemic has become a serious health threat and psychological burden for the global communities. From the conceptual perspective of affordances, this research examined the role of social media for health campaign and psychological support during the global crisis.Methods:Data from both social media and a nationwide survey were collected and analyzed. Face mask-related posts on Sina Weibo from January 1, 2020, to June 30, 2020, were retrieved and studied. Face mask wearing (...) as a well-established preventive measure was identified and examined from hashtag topics. A nationwide survey with a randomized experiment embedded was conducted to further investigate the mobilizing dynamics.Results:During the escalation phase in the first half of 2020, the hashtag topic “#national mask campaign#,” initiated by a celebrity, topped the ranking of mask-related topics on Weibo. The findings indicated that prevention activities, solidarity expression, and names of celebrity idols were frequently discussed. With celebrity idols as opinion leaders, millions of fandom publics actively participated in this hashtag health campaign. Results of the nationwide survey show the popularity of fan identity, and the experiment results demonstrate the strong mobilizing power of celebrity idol and fandom community in civic engagement and participation among young Chinese.Conclusions:The research demonstrates how the affordances of social media, such as liking, commenting, reposting, and hashtagging can be influential in promoting health behaviors and expressing solidarity. Implications for public health professionals and policymakers to raise awareness and understanding about health campaigns via social media are discussed. (shrink)

This essay considers the structure of risk in health campaign formation and design by examining an early 20th century federal campaign to reduce infant mortality. Health campaigns navigate the gap between study and practice, translating quantitative findings into prescriptive responses for individual consumers of the text. By focusing specifically on the visual rhetoric of risk, this campaign serves as a case study to examine how the public was taught to see and understand risk and preventive (...) health at a critical point in the development of public health in the United States. (shrink)

This paper describes a study conducted in collaboration with a marketing agency and a nonprofit organization providing regional sexual health services, which included advice on, and testing f...

Most of the world's health problems afflict poor countries and their poorest inhabitants. There are many reasons why so many people die of poverty-related causes. One reason is that the poor cannot access many of the existing drugs and technologies they need. Another, is that little of the research and development (R&D) done on new drugs and technologies benefits the poor. There are several proposals on the table that might incentivize pharmaceutical companies to extend access to essential drugs and (...) technologies to the global poor.1 Still, the problem remains – the poor are suffering and dying from lack of access to essential medicines. So, it is worth considering a new alternative. This paper suggests rating pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies based on how some of their policies impact poor people's health. It argues that it might be possible to leverage a rating system to encourage companies to extend access to essential drugs and technologies to the poor. (shrink)

State health departments are at the core of the United States public health infrastructure. Surveillance to monitor trends in disease and injury; the development, coordination, and delivery of services; and public education are some of the core functions health department employees oversee every day. As such, agencies and their employees are well positioned to inform policy decisions that affect the public’s health. However, little is known about the role of health department staff — a sizeable (...) proportion of the public health workforce — as advocates for public health policies, independent of their agency roles. Anecdotally, some health department employees with whom we have spoken expressed reluctance to engage in policy advocacy for fear of violating little known or understood agency or state rules. (shrink)

Prevention neuroscience investigates the brain basis of attitude and behavior change. Over the years, an increasingly structurally and functionally resolved “persuasion network” has emerged. However, current studies have only identified a small handful of neural structures that are commonly recruited during persuasive message processing, and the extent to which these (and other) structures are sensitive to numerous individual difference factors remains largely unknown. In this project we apply a multi-dimensional similarity-based individual differences analysis to explore which individual factors—including characteristics of (...) messages and target audiences—drive patterns of brain activity to be more or less similar across individuals encountering the same anti-drug public service announcements (PSAs). We demonstrate that several ensembles of brain regions show response patterns that are driven by a variety of unique factors. These results are discussed in terms of their implications for neural models of persuasion, prevention neuroscience and message tailoring, and methodological implications for future research. (shrink)

Breastfeeding and human milk are the normative standards for infant feeding and nutrition. Given the documented short- and long-term medical and neurodevelopment advantages of breastfeeding, infant nutrition should be considered a public health issue and not only a lifestyle choice.In a letter sent out to 2600 hospitals across the country they [Public Citizen] demand that healthcare facilities “immediately discontinue the distribution of commercial infant formula manufacturer discharge bags,” claiming it undermines women’s success at breastfeeding. What they failed to explain (...) is why a woman’s decision regarding her own tits is anyone’s fucking business but her own.Clearly, policies to promote breast-feeding.. (shrink)

Obesity is one of several targets of public health efforts related to availability of and access to healthy foods. The tension between individual food decisions and social contexts of food production, preparation, and consumption makes targeting individuals deeply problematic and yet tempting. Such individualization of responsibility for obesity and nutrition is unethical and impractical. This article warns public health campaigns against giving into the temptation to individualize responsibility, and presents an argument for why they should proceed with all (...) due caution, advising providers and public health organizations to keep in mind structural factors rather than aiming at individuals. (shrink)

In 2018 and 2019 Cancer Research UK launched a controversial advertising campaign to inform the British public of obesity being a preventable cause of cancer. On each occasion the advertisements used were emotive and provoked frustration among the British public which was widely vocalised on social media. As well serving to educate the public of this association, the advertisements also had the secondary effect of acting as health promotion through social marketing, a form of advertising designed to influence (...) behavioural changes. As CRUK delivered a public health message through its campaign, the advertisements should be held according to the ethical principles which underpin healthcare in the UK. This article evaluates whether the advertisements used by CRUK in 2018 and 2019 fulfilled the ethical principles of beneficence, autonomy, non-maleficence and justice. It is found that while providing an important message, the oversimplification of obesity as being the result of personal decisions ignored the complex aetiology and served to stigmatise the target demographic, potentially disengaging them from the message. Additionally, posting cancer as the consequence of obesity invokes feelings of fear due to its connotations of suffering and premature death. Based on available evidence, the use of fear in social marketing does not create sustained behavioural change. This essay recommends that CRUK discontinue its use of such strategies in its future social marketing endeavours. (shrink)

Obesity is one of several targets of public health efforts related to availability of and access to healthy foods. The tension between individual food decisions and social contexts of food production, preparation, and consumption makes targeting individuals deeply problematic and yet tempting. Such individualization of responsibility for obesity and nutrition is unethical and impractical. This article warns public health campaigns against giving into the temptation to individualize responsibility, and presents an argument for why they should proceed with all (...) due caution, advising providers and public health organizations to keep in mind structural factors rather than aiming at individuals. (shrink)

Drawing on a century of data, Common Enemies reveals why disease campaigns are the battles Americans come together to fight, why certain diseases rose to prominence, and how fighting one disease at a time changes the way we distribute resources, conceptualize problems, and promote health. Combining quantitative and qualitative analyses, Rachel Kahn Best persuasively demonstrates how disease campaigns have created unintended consequences for health policy.

Mass media campaigns are widely and successfully used to change health decisions and behaviors for better or for worse in society. In the United States, media campaigns have been launched at local offices of the states’ department of motor vehicles to promote citizens’ willingness to organ donation and donor registration. We analyze interventional studies of multimedia communication campaigns to encourage organ-donor registration at local offices of states’ department of motor vehicles. The media campaigns include the use of multifaceted communication (...) tools and provide training to desk clerks in the use of scripted messages for the purpose of optimizing enrollment in organ-donor registries. Scripted messages are communicated to customers through mass audiovisual entertainment media, print materials and interpersonal interaction at the offices of departments of motor vehicles. These campaigns give rise to three serious concerns: (1) bias in communicating information with scripted messages without verification of the scientific accuracy of information, (2) the provision of misinformation to future donors that may result in them suffering unintended consequences from consenting to medical procedures before death (e.g, organ preservation and suitability for transplantation), and (3) the unmanaged conflict of interests for organizations charged with implementing these campaigns, (i.e, dual advocacy for transplant recipients and donors). We conclude the following: (1) media campaigns about healthcare should communicate accurate information to the general public and disclose factual materials with the least amount of bias; (2) conflicting interests in media campaigns should be managed with full public transparency; (3) media campaigns should disclose the practical implications of procurement as well as acknowledge the medical, legal, and religious controversies of determining death in organ donation; (4) organ-donor registration must satisfy the criteria of informed consent; (5) media campaigns should serve as a means of public education about organ donation and should not be a form of propaganda. (shrink)

The relationship between pleasure and asceticism has been at the core of debates on western subjectivity at least since Nietzsche. Addressing this theme, this article explores the emergence of ‘non-authoritarian’ health campaigns, which do not propagate abstention from harmful substances but intend to foster a ‘well-balanced subject’ straddling pleasure and asceticism. The article seeks to develop the Foucauldian analytical framework by foregrounding a strategy of subjectivation that integrates desire, pleasure and enjoyment into health promotion. The point of departure (...) is the overwhelming emphasis in the governmentality literature on ‘prudence’, ‘self-responsibility’ or ‘risk calculation’, such that pleasure and desire remain largely absent from the framework. Some insights from Žižek’s work are introduced to help us obtain a firmer grasp on the problematic of ‘the well-balanced subject’. The article argues that, in order to analyse the transformation of interpellation in recent health promotion, we must recognize the mechanism of self-distance or dis-identification as an integral part of the procedure of subjectification. (shrink)

The ethical dimensions of health communicators' interventions and campaigns are brought into question in this thought-provoking book. Examining the efforts to effect behavior change, the author questions how far health communication can and should go in changing people's values. The author broadens the current analysis of interventions and presents conceptual frameworks that help identify values and justifications that are embedded in health communication goals, strategies, and evaluation criteria. This critical approach helps explain how and why choices are (...) made in design and implementation, and provides constructs and frameworks to examine them. It also widens the criteria for program evaluation and policymaking, and provides practitioners, planners, policy-makers, researchers, and students with practice-oriented questions. (shrink)

The current paper provides readers some clarifications on the nature and goals of mass media campaigns designed to promote organ donation. These clarifications were necessitated by an earlier essay by Rady et al. (Med Health Care Philos 15:229–241, 2012) who present erroneous claims that media promotion campaigns in this health context represent propaganda that seek to misrepresent the transplantation process. Information is also provided on the nature and relative power of media campaigns in organ donation promotion.

Health care reforms, in particular the expansion of public and/or private health care benefit coverage to some or all population groups, is becoming an increasingly hot topic for discussion—and in some cases for action—at all levels of government. With almost 16% of Americans estimated to be uninsured for at least part of the year, opinion polls show health care near the top of the general public’s list of concerns. Little wonder that presidential candidates for the 2008 election (...) are incorporating ‘‘universal health care coverage’’ proposals in their campaign platforms. Will ‘‘cradle-to-grave’’ coverage for all become a reality or will they just experience cradle-to-grave debates over this issue? That is essentially one of the questions posed in the following discussion on the role of nonprofit health care organizations in promoting, and operating under, universal health care coverage. (shrink)

Doping poses a threat to sport worldwide. Studies have revealed that, in addition to elite athletes, amateur and recreational sportsmen and sportswomen are making increasing use of performance-enhancing drugs. Worryingly this trend has been documented among young people. Anti-doping efforts seeking to deter elite athletes from doping through detection of the use of prohibited substances are costly and have not been completely effective either at the top-level or the amateur/recreational level. A thoughtful education program, inspired by honesty and respect, might (...) be more effective in shaping attitudes towards doping in young people and protecting their health. For these reasons, the Italian “Lotta al Doping” (Fight Against Doping) project sought to cause a cultural shift in young people by taking anti-doping seminars to high schools. In the 2017-2018 school year we reached more than 20,800 students from 157 high schools through 202 seminars. Before and after the seminars, we administrated anonymous, voluntarily completed surveys with a set of questions (items = 15), taken from the WADA-Play-True-Quiz. Upon completion of the 2-hour seminar, the majority of the answers given by the students resulted correct (13 out of 15 items, p<0.000001, McNemar) confirming the value of the initiative. This project stands out as promising in the doping prevention process at the youth and amateur levels. (shrink)

Suicide is a public health problem which will require an integrated cross-sector approach to help reduce prevalence rates. One strategy is to include the legal system in a more integrated way with suicide prevention efforts. Caine explored a public health approach to suicide prevention, depicting risk factors across the socio-ecological model. The purpose of this paper is to examine laws that impact suicide prevention at the individual, relational, community, and societal levels. These levels are fluid, and some interventions (...) will fall between two, such as a community-level approach to training that enhances provider-patient relationships. At the individual level, we will review laws to improve screening requirements across systems. At the relational level, we note interventions with couples having conflict, such as protection orders and access to attorney consultations, which have been known to be injury prevention mechanisms. At the community level, we discuss legislation that recommends suicide prevention efforts for key individuals working as frontline providers in the medical and educational systems. At the societal level, we explore public awareness campaigns that target stigma reduction for those suffering from mental health burden and enhance linkage to care. The article closes with the discussion that laws are good, but their implementation is essential. (shrink)

This paper reflects on Lawrence Gostin’s Global Health Law. In so doing seeks to contribute to the debate about how global health justice is best conceived and achieved. Gostin’s vision of global health is one which is communal and in which health is directly connected to other justice concerns. Hence the need for health-in-all policies, and the importance of focusing on basic and communal health goods rather than high-tech and individual ones. This paper asks (...) whether this broadly communal vision of global health justice is best served by making the right to health central to the project. It explores a number of reasons why rights-talk might be problematic in the context of health justice; namely, structurally, rights are individual and state-centric and politically, they are oppositional and better suited to single-issue campaigns. The paper argues that stripping rights of their individualist assumptions is difficult, and perhaps impossible, and hence alternative approaches, such as those Gostin endorses based on global public goods and health security, might deliver much, perhaps most, global health goods, while avoiding the problems of rights-talk. (shrink)

This case examines BP company’s launch of a new global brand - under the banner of “Beyond Petroleum” and a new logo – a vibrant sunburst of green, while, and yellow – in 2000. The case also analyzes the series of environmental health and a safety problem BP suffered since the launch of the “Beyond Petroleum” campaign and explores what important lessons that can be drawn for companies that might be considering sustainability factors in their branding strategies.

The growing interest in lifestyle campaigns as a means to promote public health has increased steadily during the past several decades. Governments, national health organizations, NGOs, and wealthy donors are collaborating with media professionals and academic scholars to address the pressing health issues of the 21st century. To counter the potential negative influences of hundreds of lifestyle advertising messages that media consumers are exposed to on a daily basis, health communication professionals are designing more sophisticated campaigns (...) that blend beneficial health information with various forms of entertainment media. This article discusses important ethical considerations raised by health professionals and media scholars and considers lifestyle campaigns within the context of competing ethical approaches to social change. A heuristic model is presented that facilitates a communitarian ethical approach to lifestyle campaigns, examining four important groups of stakeholders. Specific recommendations for future lifestyle campaigns based on this model are proposed. (shrink)

A few years ago, the New York City Department of Health introduced a public health campaign entitled “Cut Your Portions, Cut Your Risk”, a series of posters in which images of food in increasingly large portion sizes appear. In one example, three packets of french fries are featured; in another, cheeseburgers are shown. In a red box in each, the text, in large, all-capital letters in English and Spanish, reads “Portions have grown,” and, below this, in all (...) capitals, “so has obesity, which can lead to many health problems” or “so has type 2 diabetes, which can lead to amputations.” Beneath the food, the posters admonish, again in all-capital... (shrink)

Each year, infection with Human Papillomavirus (HPV) leads to millions of abnormal Pap smears and thousands of cases of cervical cancer in the US. Throughout the developing world, where Pap smears are less common, HPV is a leading cause of cancer death among women. So when the international pharmaceutical giant Merck developed a vaccine that could prevent infection with several key strains of HPV, the public health community was anxious to celebrate a major advance. But then marketing and lobbying (...) got in the way. Merck chose to pursue an aggressive lobbying campaign, trying to make its new vaccine mandatory for young girls. The campaign stoked public mistrust about how vaccines come to be mandated, and now it's not just Merck's public image that has taken a hit. The public health community has also been affected. What is the lesson to be learned from this story? Public health communication relies on public trust. (shrink)

After the US Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade, a number of states have immediately banned abortion. Pro-choice activists are responding by promoting medication abortions – a do-it-yourself form of abortion. Women can take pills at home to induce an abortion in the first few weeks of pregnancy. -/- The Biden Administration [1] has backed the abortion pill, too. Attorney-General Merrick B. Garland and Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra both issued statements endorsing it. -/- “We stand (...) ready to work with other arms of the federal government that seek to use their lawful authorities to protect and preserve access to reproductive care,” said the Attorney-General. “In particular, the F.D.A. has approved the use of the medication mifepristone. States may not ban mifepristone based on disagreement with the F.D.A.’s expert judgment about its safety and efficacy.” -/- As the New York Times [1] has noted, this sets the scene for legal battles. The obvious one is: will anti-abortion states prosecute medication abortions? -/- But – based on experience in the United Kingdom - the use of the abortion pill could give pro-life doctors headaches as well. -/- In the past year, UK has witnessed the saga of two Catholic doctors who have been brought in front of the professional regulator, the General Medical Council, after accusations of professional misconduct. Their crime? They had supplied abortion pill reversal (APR) treatment to women. Accusations of this misconduct have been brought forward by pro-choice organisations [2]. -/- The problem is that some women might panic when they discover that they are pregnant or are pressured to make a rash decision. They obtain abortion pills, often without seeing a doctor faceto- face, and soon after taking the first pill, they regret their decision. -/- Is it too late for them to save their pregnancy? Not necessarily. -/- A treatment developed in the US works about half the time. It involves the woman taking progesterone after the first abortion pill to counteract the abortifacient action of the drug. -/- Seventy-three women in the UK are reported to have taken a full APR course, of whom, 38 – more than half — successfully remained pregnant. Admittedly, the procedure is controversial [3], with pro-choice writers denouncing it as unproven, unscientific, and unethical. This has triggered some healthcare practitioners and scholars to analyse the commitments of the pro-choice movement to APR. In a recently published paper in The New Bioethics [4], two colleagues, Dominic Whitehouse and Steven Bow, and I argue that those espousing a pro-choice worldview should actually support abortion pill reversal and that the current evidence indicates that they should actually be doing it. -/- While some pro-choice activists might be happy simply to expand women’s reproductive choices, some might also want to ensure that these choices are safe and effective at achieving the desired outcome, which in principle includes maintaining a pregnancy. -/- We then review the scientific evidence with respect to the ability of APR to halt an abortion, look at the potential impact of APR on mental health, as well as its procedural safety. While highlighting that gold-standard evidence is lacking, we note that APR is associated with about two times higher rate of embryo survival compared to not completing the full early medical abortion course, that there is large agreement in the literature that women who are ambiguous about abortion are at risk of poorer mental health outcomes after abortion (and argue that women who request APR fall into this category), and highlight that there is no evidence that APR is more dangerous than abandoning an initiated early medical abortion. -/- The latter fact is important, as the results of the only randomised-controlled trial of APR have been at times misrepresented in the media [5.6], creating the impression that APR is not safe while most of the adverse effects occurred in the study group that did not receive APR. As our paper argues, with respect to APR the two UK doctors were “champions of women’s choice and should be congratulated, not condemned, by pro-choice advocates”. -/- While the cases against the two doctors have now been dropped (and there have even been accusations against a member of one of these pro-choice organisations that they pressurised a patient into complaining about one of the doctors and twisted the patient’s experience of the treatment [7]), we argue that it is important to set-up systems to facilitate the future provision of APR to protect both patients and healthcare staff. -/- Our conclusion is that, while being open to any change in evidence, those espousing a pro-choice outlook should “support calls for an APR framework that will protect women and the healthcare professionals caring for them” “and certainly not oppose” APR. -/- The debate over abortion pill reversal will be heading to the United States soon. It is quite possible that it will be denounced as dangerous misinformation. It’s not. But pro-life defenders should be prepared to defend their ground. -/- This article was first published by Mercatornet. (shrink)

Encouraged by the success of smoking denormalization strategies as a tobacco-control measure, public health institutions are adopting a similar approach to other health behaviors. For example, a recent controversial ad campaign in New York explicitly aimed to denormalize HIV/AIDS amongst gay men. Authors such as Scott Burris have argued that efforts like this are tantamount to stigmatization and that such stigmatization is unethical because it is dehumanizing. Others have offered a limited endorsement of denormalization/stigmatization campaigns as being (...) justified on consequentialist grounds; namely, that the potential public health benefits outweigh any stigmatizing side effects. In this paper, I examine and reject the blanket condemnation of stigmatization efforts in public health. I argue that the moral status of such efforts are best evaluated within a contractualist, as opposed to a consequentialist, framework. Contractualism in public health ethics asks whether a particular stigmatizing policy could be justified to reasonable individuals who do not know whether they will be affected by that policy. Using this approach, I argue that it is sometimes permissible for public health institutions to engage in health-related stigmatization. (shrink)

Health professionals are involved in humanitarian assistance and development work in many regions of the world. They participate in primary health care, immunization campaigns, clinic- and hospital-based care, rehabilitation and feeding programs. In the course of this work, clinicians are frequently exposed to complex ethical issues. This paper examines how health workers experience ethics in the course of humanitarian assistance and development work. A qualitative study was conducted to consider this question. Five core themes emerged from the (...) data, including: tension between respecting local customs and imposing values; obstacles to providing adequate care; differing understandings of health and illness; questions of identity for health workers; and issues of trust and distrust. Recommendations are made for organizational strategies that could help aid agencies support and equip their staff as they respond to ethical issues. (shrink)

ArgumentThe article builds a case for the Society for the Protection of the Health of the Jewish Population (Obshchestvo Okhranenia Zdorov’ia Evreiskogo Naselenia [OZE]) as a project of medicalized modernity, a mass politics of Jewish self-help that relied on a racialized and medicalized vision of a future Jewish nation. Officially registered in 1912 in St. Petersburg, it created the space for a Jewish politics that focused on the state of the collective Jewish body as a precondition for Jewish participation (...) in any version of modernity. OZE futurism survived the years of World War I and the Russian Civil War, when the organization had to concentrate on rescue and relief rather than on facilitating the development of new bodies and souls. New archival evidence reveals how race science, medical statistics, and positive eugenics became composite elements of the Jewish anticolonial message and new subjectivity. (shrink)

On 18 November 2014, the United Nations launched an urgent new campaign to end AIDS as a global health threat by 2030. With its proposed strategy, the UN follows leading scientists who had declared the failure of former prevention strategies and now were promoting a ‘Seek and Treat for Optimal Prevention’ (STOP) approach as the most cost‐effective response to the pandemic to meet the goal of ‘an AIDS‐free generation’. STOP combines antiretroviral therapy and routine HIV screening to find (...) persons unaware that they are HIV‐positive, because research has shown that people consistently change their behaviour (i.e. increase condom use, have fewer partners) after an HIV diagnosis. AIDS activists have broadly criticized this strategy on different levels. In this article, we go beyond these criticisms and try to analyse the political rationalities behind this ‘new’ strategy. We believe that it is necessary to put the rationale underpinning the STOP programme into the context of broader societal transformations that can best be captured as the development of advanced liberal societies and the new emphasis on self‐controlling or self‐responsibility rather than on disciplining behaviour. (shrink)

Health insurance exchanges can organize the market for health insurance by connecting small businesses and individuals into larger insurance pools. HIEs have been proposed as a possible means of making insurance more accessible, increasing competition among health plans, and promoting choice of insurer. President Obama's campaign proposal and various congressional leaders have proposed establishing insurance exchanges through federal legislation. However, whether the federal or state government, or even a private entity, can organize an insurance exchange to (...) connect health insurance sellers and buyers under the law is the question explored in this paper. Specifically, the paper addresses legal restraints or limitations to such an exchange at the federal, state or private entity level, and offers solutions. Although exchanges implicate many design and policy issues regardless of whether they are implemented at a federal, state, or private entity level, the paper concludes that are no absolute legal bars to the establishment of health insurance exchanges. (shrink)

Several recent anti-obesity campaigns appear to embrace stigmatization of obese individuals as a public health strategy. These approaches seem to be based on the fundamental assumptions that (1) obesity is largely under an individual’s control and (2) stigmatizing obese individuals will motivate them to change their behavior and will also result in successful behavior change. The empirical evidence does not support these assumptions: Although body weight is, to some degree, under individuals’ personal control, there are a range of biopsychosocial (...) barriers that make weight regulation difficult. Furthermore, there is accumulating evidence that stigmatizing obese individuals decreases their motivation to diet, exercise, and lose weight. Public health campaigns should focus on facilitating behavioral change, rather than stigmatizing obese people, and should be grounded in the available empirical evidence. Fundamentally, these campaigns should, first, do no harm. (shrink)

The Supreme Court decided Box v. Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky in 2019. Justice Clarence Thomas’s opinion in the case claimed there was a direct connection between the legalization of abortion, in the late 20th Century, and the beginnings of the birth control movement a full three quarters of a century earlier. “Many eugenicists,” Thomas argued, “supported legalizing abortion.”Justice Samuel Alito highlighted similar claims in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, citing a brief entitled “The Eugenic Era Lives on (...) through the Abortion Movement.” That brief was an echo of Justice Thomas’ misguided attempt at history in the Box opinion. Similar claims reoccur in Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk’s opinion in the Texas mifepristone case, Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. U.S. Food and Drug Administration.These false claims are the focus of this article. There is no evidence that early leaders of the eugenics movement supported abortion as part of the movement for birth control. It is accurate to describe those leaders as anti-abortion, and their followers as people who condemned abortion for moral, legal, and medical reasons. (shrink)

We respond to Morgan and Feeley’s critique on our article “Mass Media in Organ Donation: Managing Conflicting Messages and Interests.” We noted that Morgan and Feeley agree with the position that the primary aims of media campaigns are: “to educate the general public about organ donation process” and “help individuals make informed decisions” about organ donation. For those reasons, the educational messages in media campaigns should not be restricted to “information from pilot work or focus groups” but should include evidence-based (...) facts resulting from a comprehensive literature research. We consider the controversial aspects about organ donation to be relevant, if not necessary, educational materials that must be disclosed in media campaigns to comply with the legal and moral requirements of informed consent. With that perspective in mind, we address the validity of Morgan and Feeley’s claim that media campaigns have no need for informing the public about the controversial nature of death determination in organ donation. Scientific evidence has proven that the criteria for death determination are inconsistent with the Uniform Determination of Death Act and therefore potentially harmful to donors. The decision by campaign designers to use the statutory definition of death without disclosing the current controversies surrounding that definition does not contribute to improved informed decision making. We argue that if Morgan and Feeley accept the important role of media campaigns to enhance informed decision making, then critical controversies should be disclosed. In support of that premise, we will outline: (1) the wide-spread scientific challenges to brain death as a concept of death; (2) the influence of the donor registry and team-huddling on the medical care of potential donors; (3) the use of authorization rather than informed consent for donor registration; (4) the contemporary religious controversy; and (5) the effects of training desk clerks as organ requestors at the Department of Motor Vehicles offices. We conclude that organ donation is a medical procedure subject to all the ethical obligations that the medical profession must uphold including that of transparency and truthfulness. (shrink)

Indoor radon is a natural radioactive gas that enters homes through cracks in the foundations. It is one of the leading causes of lung cancer. Although radon can be detected with an indoor radon test and can be mitigated by means of either ventilation or professional measures, testing and mitigating rates of the at-risk population remain insufficient. The objective of this study is to systematically review the current level of evidence regarding the design and effectiveness of mass media campaigns to (...) address the health risks of indoor radon to homeowners. The results show that informative tone of voices prevailed, other components, such as emotional or social components, were often not included. Furthermore, the focus was mostly on intention and less on behavior itself, and on testing instead of mitigation. Further research is needed to test effective and innovative communication strategies to increase protective behavior concerning indoor radon. (shrink)

In Norway, priority for health interventions is assigned on the basis of three official criteria: health benefit, resources, and severity. Responses to the COVID-19 pandemic have mainly happened through intersectoral public health efforts such as lockdowns, quarantines, information campaigns, social distancing and, more recently, vaccine distribution. The aim of this article is to evaluate potential priority setting criteria for public health interventions. We argue in favour of the following three criteria for public health priority setting: (...) benefit, resources and improving the well-being of the worse off. We argue that benefits and priority to the worse off may reasonably be understood in terms of individual well-being, rather than only health, for public health priority setting. We argue that lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic support our conclusions. Keywords: COVID-19, Prioritarianism, Priority Setting, Public Health, Severity. (shrink)

Mothers serve as an important layer of the health-care system, with special responsi-bilities to care for the health of families and nations. In our social discourse, we tend to treat maternal “choices” as though they were morally and causally Self-contained units of influence with primary control over children's health. In this essay, I use infant feeding as a lens for examining the ethical contours of mothers’ caretaking practices and responsibilities, as they are situated within cultural meanings and (...) institutional pressures. I give a close critical reading of the content and strategy of the new breastfeeding advocacy campaign sponsored by the United States Department of Health and Human Services. I argue that the campaign is unlikely to substantially increase breastfeeding rates, unresponsive and even hostile to many women's actual concerns about breastfeeding, and well positioned to produce shame and compromise agency among the women it targets. (shrink)

Breastfeeding advocates and global health agencies have been sounding alarms about the dangers of digital marketing practices of the formula-feeding industry. This study comprised a feminist discourse analysis of materials produced (blog, social media posts, comments) in a paid partnership between baby formula brand Enfamil and an influencer, Marilou Bourdon from Trois fois par jour. Our analysis reveals a sophisticated marketing campaign that co-opts feminist critiques of breastfeeding promotion discourse while carefully avoiding explicitly violating the International Code of (...) Marketing of Breast-milk Substitutes. Underlying this campaign is a rhetoric reliant on pathos to assuage maternal guilt and shame for feeding formula. (shrink)

Direct-to-consumer advertising is banned in Australia, and instead pharmaceutical companies use disease awareness campaigns as a strategy to raise public awareness of conditions for which the company produces a treatment. This practice has been justified by promoting individual autonomy and public health, but it has attracted criticism regarding medicalisation of normal health and ageing, and exaggeration of the severity of the condition in question, imbalanced reporting of risks and benefits, and damaging the patient–clinician relationship. While there are benefits (...) of disease awareness promotion, there is another possible adverse consequence that has not yet been rigorously considered: the possibility of inducing a nocebo response via the campaign. We will discuss the creation of a nocebo response in this context. (shrink)

: Mothers serve as an important layer of the health-care system, with special responsibilities to care for the health of families and nations. In our social discourse, we tend to treat maternal "choices" as though they were morally and causally self-contained units of influence with primary control over children's health. In this essay, I use infant feeding as a lens for examining the ethical contours of mothers' caretaking practices and responsibilities, as they are situated within cultural meanings (...) and institutional pressures. I give a close critical reading of the content and strategy of the new breastfeeding advocacy campaign sponsored by the United States Department of Health and Human Services. I argue that the campaign is unlikely to substantially increase breastfeeding rates, unresponsive and even hostile to many women's actual concerns about breastfeeding, and well positioned to produce shame and compromise agency among the women it targets. (shrink)

Health communication researchers and practitioners continue to debate about the types of influence that are appropriate in health promotion. A widely held assumption is that health campaigns and communicators should respect the autonomy of their audiences, and that the most appropriate way to do so is to persuade them by means of truthful substantive information. This approach to ethical persuasion, though, suffers from certain blind spots. To account for circumstances when respecting autonomy might take a back seat (...) to other ethical considerations, a comprehensive framework for the ethics of health communication needs to acknowledge types of communication that aim to do something other than provide substantive information (disclosive and directive communication), and subjective circumstances when people are not motivated to process information or make active choices (low processing motivation and decision aversion). (shrink)

This paper examines the trust relations involved in Israel’s COVID-19 vaccination campaign, focusing on vaccine hesitancy and the concept of ‘trust’. The first section offers a conceptual analysis of ‘trust’. Instead of analyzing trust in the vaccination campaign as a whole, a few objects of trust are identified and examined. In section two, the Israeli vaccination campaign is presented, and the focus is placed on vaccine hesitancy. In section three, different trust relations are examined: public trust in (...) the Israeli government and health institutions, interpersonal trust in healthcare professionals and experts, trust in the pharmaceutical companies that make the COVID-19 vaccine, the US FDA, and trust in the new vaccine and the new technology. Through this complexity of trust relations, I argue that it is impossible to completely separate the trust that the vaccine is safe and effective from social aspects of mistrust. Additionally, practices of silencing and censoring the concerns of vaccine hesitaters – both experts and among the public, are pointed out. I contend that these cases further minimize vaccine hesitaters' trust in vaccine-related entities. In contrast, in section four, I suggest the ‘trust-based approach’: since vaccine hesitancy is not solely the result of knowledge deficiency but also a lack of trust relations, any campaign that addresses vaccine hesitancy should also focus on trust. The advantages of this approach are spelled out. For governments, a discussion based on trust is, ultimately, the best democratic way to encourage hesitaters to take the plunge and get vaccinated. (shrink)

is a new campaign devoted to reducing the environmental harmsgenerated by the healthcare industry. One of the leading local proponents of this effort is Michael Lerner, founder of Commonweal, a Bolinas, Californiagenius grant”).

The obligations of organisations associated with policy formation and implementation of international mass public health programmes are explored. Lines of responsibility are considered to become unclear because of the large number of agencies associated with such programmes. A separation of the relevant obligations among the bodies responsible for the formulation and those responsible for the implementation of the policies is suggested. The continuing oral polio vaccine campaign against poliomyelitis in India is used to illustrate the general argument. Although (...) the aim of the programme is legitimate and laudable, unnecessary harm is currently being caused to some children as a result of elements of the policy and this should be rectified immediately. Such mass programmes should take care to ensure that people are not unnecessarily sacrificed in the drive to attain the desirable ends of the policy. (shrink)

While many experts and organizations have recognized infertility as a public health issue, most governments have not yet adopted a public health approach to infertility. This article argues in favor of such an approach by discussing the various implications of infertility for public health. We use a conceptual framework that focuses on the dual meaning of the term ‘public’ in this context: the health of the public, as opposed to that of individuals, and the public/collective nature (...) of the required interventions. This analysis highlights the need for a comprehensive public health approach toward infertility, points to some initiatives that are already in place and demonstrates that prevention is currently a neglected—yet much needed——element. We move on to discuss the sensitive nature of prevention initiatives as a probable explanation for their scarcity. We illustrate the complexity of prevention through an analysis of an infertility prevention campaign previously conducted in the United States, which provoked significant controversy. We use a public health communication ethics framework to expose the strengths and the shortcomings of this campaign, and conclude that prevention initiatives targeting infertility can indeed be conducted in a sensible way that promotes autonomy while improving public health. (shrink)

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the Peruvian Andes ranked as a key international destination for those afflicted with one of the world’s most deadly diseases, tuberculosis. Physicians, scientists, policy makers, and patients believed that high-elevation mountain climates worldwide would help cure the disease. Historical processes driving the creation of Andean health resorts, which are understudied in the historiography, uncover an important story in the history of tuberculosis, and also reveal how global health initiatives and disease (...) treatment played out within the global South, where national forces and local environmental conditions influenced the trajectory of science and medicine. Jauja, Peru, became an internationally recognized health resort for tuberculosis treatment not only through science and medicine but also through national political integration campaigns, transportation initiatives, economic development agendas, social relations, cultural perspectives of the Andean landscape, and the impact of the physical environment. This historical case about the evolution of Jauja reveals how science and medicine are shaped by distinct spatial forces that illuminate a geography of science in the postcolonial setting, as well as the ways in which climate is culturally constructed in specific sites, by different peoples, and at distinct points in time. (shrink)

Flick Grey interrogates the mental health discourse around anti-stigma, recovery, consumer participation, and co-production in relation to a larger discursive context around othering and seeks to question how much they challenge existing power relations. Grey approaches this question through an analysis of a billboard campaign that was mounted in 2008 by Mind in Australia, and asks us to look beyond the apparently positive representations of mental health service users and modes of involving them and to situate such (...) strategies within a discourse of ‘benevolent othering.’ Rather than challenge or change established modes of representation and involvement, these ostensibly positive images and modes of... (shrink)