Reclaiming the narrative: countering harmful commercial discourses.

The discourses promoted by powerful commercial actors whose business activities are damaging to health undermine the potential for the transformational changes urgently needed to address pressing public health and environmental threats globally. This piece provides an analysis of corporate discursive practices and the mechanisms through which they contaminate scientific and policy debates and harm public and environmental health. We refer to this phenomenon as 'discursive pollution' to reflect the parallels between the effects of informational strategies and the commercial activities of harmful industries.

Overcoming doubt: developing CDoH Essentials, a practical tool to introduce the commercial determinants of health.

Despite growing awareness of the importance of commercial determinants of health (CDoH), there has been limited development or evaluation of educational and practice-focused support for public health professionals. This article reports findings from an action-research approach bringing together people with academic and practice expertise (n = 16) to co-create workshop materials (called 'CDoH Essentials'), test and improve them through five trial workshops and explore their effects. Five English local public health teams co-facilitated the workshops in their organizations, with participants from public health teams and their internal partners (n = 94).

Addressing the commercial determinants of mental health: an umbrella review of population-level interventions.

There is increasing evidence that commercial determinants impact mental health. Addressing the commercial determinants may therefore be a way of improving population-level mental health. This umbrella review aimed to provide an overview of evidence in this field and identify knowledge gaps.

Tobacco industry narratives of e-cigarette use in the UK: a qualitative framing analysis.

Public health actors have expressed concerns over the entry of the tobacco industry into the UK e-cigarette market. It is important to be aware of the tobacco industry's involvement and stated aims for e-cigarettes in the UK, given their historical attempts to divert attention from and escape responsibility for the harms caused by combustible cigarettes. The use of e-cigarettes amongst young people in the UK has remained constant, despite the law prohibiting sales to adolescents and claims by manufacturers and others that they are designed solely as a tool to quit smoking.

Mixed species biofilms act as planktonic cell factories despite isothiazolinone exposure under continuous-flow conditions.

The primary approach to managing biofouling in industrial water systems involves the large-scale use of biocides. It is well-established that biofilms are 'cell factories' that release planktonic cells even when challenged with antimicrobials. The effect of isothiazolinone on the metabolic activity and biomass of mixed Pseudomonas biofilms was monitored in real-time using the CEMS-BioSpec system.

Commercial determinants of mental ill health: An umbrella review.

Mental ill health has complex and interrelated underlying causes, with wider determinants of health often overlooked as risk factors. The 'commercial determinants of health' are gradually receiving more attention and recognition but there is a relative lack of awareness of the commercial determinants of mental health. This aim of this umbrella review was to synthesise systematic review level evidence for the association between commercial determinants and mental health outcomes.

Alternative cancer clinics' use of Google listings and reviews to mislead potential patients.

Background: Alternative cancer clinics, who provide treatment associated with earlier time to death, actively seek to create favorable views of their services online. An unexplored means where alternative cancer clinics can shape their appeal is their Google search results.

Methods: We retrieved the Google listing and Google reviews of 47 prominent alternative cancer clinics on August 22, 2022.

The Perils of Partnership: Interactions Between Public Health England, Drinkaware, and the Portman Group Surrounding the Drink Free Days Campaign.

Background: There is growing evidence that the alcohol industry seeks to obstruct public health policies that might affect future alcohol sales. In parallel, the alcohol industry funds organisations that engage in "responsible drinking" campaigns. Evidence is growing that the content and delivery of such campaigns serves industry, rather than public health interests, yet these organizations continue to be the subject of partnerships with government health departments.

Placing Trust at the Heart of Health Policy and Systems.

Trusted interactions are crucial in health systems. Trust facilitates effective healthcare by encouraging patients to seek and adhere to treatment, enabling teamwork among health professionals, reducing miscommunication and medical errors, and fostering innovation and resilience. The COVID-19 pandemic underscored the importance of trust, highlighting the challenges in establishing and maintaining it, especially during crises when trust in authorities and health systems is vital for compliance and safety.

The role of metaphor in the corporate political strategies of health harming industries: Comparing the concept of balance in the gambling and opioid industry discourses.

Scholars have identified notable similarities between the political strategies employed by health-harming industries. This includes similarities in the narratives employed by industry actors seeking to oppose public health regulations that threaten their commercial interests. This study seeks to examine the use of a specific concept - the balance metaphor - in the policy discourses of two health-harming industries.

Meeting the challenges of the 21st century: the fundamental importance of trust for transformation.

Background: This paper is one of a collection on challenges facing health systems in the future. One obvious challenge is how to transform to meet changing health needs and take advantage of emerging treatment opportunities. However, we argue that effective transformations are only possible if there is trust in the health system.

The WHO Foundation in global health governance: Depoliticizing corporate philanthropy.

The creation of the WHO Foundation during the COVID-19 pandemic represents a significant institutional development in the politics of financing the World Health Organization (WHO). In the context of longstanding acute financial pressures, the objective of the WHO Foundation is to widen WHO's resource base by attracting philanthropic donations from the commercial sector. In placing funding decisions 'at one remove' from WHO, the stated expectation is that the WHO Foundation will act as an intermediary, insulating the WHO from potential conflicts of interest and reputational risk through a combination of strategic distance from WHO and proximity with its norms and rules of engagement with non-state actors.

Under-representation of the WHO African region in clinical trials of interventions against hepatitis B virus infection.

The WHO African region bears a disproportionate burden of morbidity and mortality related to chronic hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection and accounts for an estimated 70% of new HBV infections worldwide. We investigated the extent to which HBV clinical trials represented populations in this region by searching the WHO International Clinical Trials Registry Platform and ClinicalTrials.gov for interventional clinical trials published in English between database inception and May 29, 2023, using the search term "Hepatitis B".

Agnogenic practices and corporate political strategy: the legitimation of UK gambling industry-funded youth education programmes.

Agnogenic practices-designed to create ignorance or doubt-are well-established strategies employed by health-harming industries (HHI). However, little is known about their use by industry-funded organizations delivering youth education programmes. We applied a previously published framework of corporate agnogenic practices to analyse how these organizations used them in three UK gambling industry-funded youth education programmes.

Highlighting the limitations of static microplate biofilm assays for industrial biocide effectiveness compared to dynamic flow conditions.

The minimal inhibitory concentration of an antimicrobial required to inhibit the growth of planktonic populations (minimum inhibitory concentration [MIC]) remains the 'gold standard' even though biofilms are acknowledged to be recalcitrant to concentrations that greatly exceed the MIC. As a result, most studies focus on biofilm tolerance to high antimicrobial concentrations, whereas the effect of environmentally relevant sub-MIC on biofilms is neglected. The effect of the MIC and sub-MIC of an isothiazolinone biocide on a microbial community isolated from an industrial cooling system was assessed under static and flow conditions.

Pharmacokinetics and safety of first-line tuberculosis drugs rifampin, isoniazid, ethambutol, and pyrazinamide during pregnancy and postpartum: results from IMPAACT P1026s.

Physiological changes during pregnancy may alter the pharmacokinetics (PK) of antituberculosis drugs. The International Maternal Pediatric Adolescent AIDS Clinical Trials Network P1026s was a multicenter, phase IV, observational, prospective PK and safety study of antiretroviral and antituberculosis drugs administered as part of clinical care in pregnant persons living with and without HIV. We assessed the effects of pregnancy on rifampin, isoniazid, ethambutol, and pyrazinamide PK in pregnant and postpartum (PP) persons without HIV treated for drug-susceptible tuberculosis disease.