The column this week investigates the digital platforms as powerful commercial determinants of health, and reports on a new modelling study suggesting that lead exposure is a massive global health threat.
We also cover the power of patients voices, progress on tobacco, news from various conferences, and preview a stack of interesting upcoming events, as well as some new job opportunities.
The quotable?
Since the founding of the UN and WHO in the aftermath of World War II, there has perhaps never been more consequential moment for global health security.”
Digital threats
Threads, the social media platform owned by Meta, has rolled out a new search function – but it is blocking searches on terms including ‘coronavirus’, ‘vaccines,’ ‘COVID, and ‘long COVID’, the Washington Post has reported.
Meta told the newspaper in a statement that Threads is intentionally blocking the search terms and said that other terms are being blocked, but the company declined to provide a list of them.
“The search functionality temporarily doesn’t provide results for keywords that may show potentially sensitive content,” the statement said, adding that the company will add search functionality for terms only “once we are confident in the quality of the results.”
The decision has been criticised by public health experts, and is in line with wider moves to Meta to de-platform news globally. Facebook traffic to news sites in Australia has plummeted, and this is a global trend.
These moves have many implications for health and democracy at a time when misinformation and disinformation is undermining public policy and debate, as we are seeing with the Voice. It suggests, for example, that viral misinformation will continue to spread far more widely and quickly on digital platforms than journalistic efforts to fact-check such claims.
Meanwhile, researchers from England and the United States have outlined a solid case for considering social media companies as key commercial determinants of health, warranting regulation and further research.
Writing in the International Journal of Health Policy and Management, they say the lack of regulation of social media enables other industries to abuse such platform tools, amplifying the public health concerns.
“Moving forward, we encourage public health researchers, and particularly those using social media in their research, to carefully assess the complex health impacts of social media technologies and the nature of the business structures underpinning them,” they wrote.
Global health
The United Nations has convened a special Sustainable Development Goals summit in New York on Monday and Tuesday next week to review progress and accelerate the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, Health Policy Watch reports.
The draft political declaration for the summit concedes that the achievement of the 17 SDGs “is in peril”, declaring that progress is “either moving much too slowly or has regressed below the 2015 baseline”.
The publication begins: “On September 20, 2023, United Nations (UN) Member States will hold a historic High-Level Meeting at the UN Headquarters in New York to adopt a Political Declaration on Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness, and Response. It is an opportunity to shine a spotlight on and build high-level political support for major global reforms to make the world safer and fairer. The UN High-Level Meeting in New York is being held as the World Health Organization (WHO) is negotiating two fundamental reforms: a new Pandemic Accord and revisions to the International Health Regulations (2005) (IHR). Since the founding of the UN and WHO in the aftermath of World War II, there has perhaps never been [a] more consequential moment for global health security. The processes in New York and Geneva come in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the greatest threat to global public health in a century.”
This modelling study, ‘Global health burden and cost of lead exposure in children and adults: a health impact and economic modelling analysis’, estimates that children younger than five years lost 765 million IQ points and that 5,545,000 adults died from cardiovascular disease in 2019 due to lead exposure, the researchers reported in The Lancet Planetary Health.
Read: Food industry has tried to stack a key nutrition policy panel with its preferred experts 
Read: Ultra-processed food consumption, mediating biomarkers, and risk of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease: a prospective cohort study in the UK Biobank
Conference watch
Fighting for justice
#AusPol
See Minister Mark Butler’s statement on reforms:
- updating and improving graphic warnings on packaging, including extending warnings to individual cigarettes
- standardising the size of tobacco packets and products
- preventing the use of specified additives in tobacco products like menthols
- standardising the design and look of filters
- limiting the use of appealing names that imply reduced harm
- requiring health promotion inserts in packs and pouches
- improving transparency of tobacco sales volumes, product contents, and advertising and promotional activities
- capturing vapes in advertising restrictions.
The integration of a controversial online doctor service, InstantScripts, alongside Bunnings, Kmart and hundreds of pharmacies in the Wesfarmers portfolio has raised concerns among medical practitioners about potential risks to patient data security, reports Guardian Australia. Wesfarmers, which owns hundreds of Priceline Pharmacy and Soul Pattinson Chemist stores, spent $135m in July purchasing InstantScripts.
See more on the mental health reform advisory committee, including links to details of its meetings. 
Events
Jobs
