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Topic
From Marlboro to Meta: Combatting the Health Impacts of Market-Driven Epidemics
Date & Time

Selected Sessions:

Feb 19, 2025 12:00 PM

Description
Over the last 50 years, economic development has lifted millions of people from poverty, increased child survival and life expectancy, and improved human health and well-being. Concurrently, the market economy has commercialized a wide range of products whose unhealthy use is exacting substantial human and financial costs. Each year, tobacco, alcohol, ultra-processed foods, sugar, social media, and other consumer products are contributing to nearly 1 million annual U.S. deaths and 23 million worldwide deaths. Reducing human and financial costs has proven extremely challenging and, even when successful, takes decades to achieve. In a 2024 PLOS Global Public Health article, Duke and UNC researchers coined the term, market-driven epidemics (MDEs) to describe the widespread unhealthy use of consumer products whose harm has been purposefully hidden, denied, or minimized by their producers and for which companies have actively resisted effective mitigation. Using successful and unsuccessful examples from tobacco, sugar, prescription opioids, firearms, and commercial milk formula MDEs, this Think Global will address the questions: What are “market-driven epidemics”? Why do they matter? What are the commercial, neuro-psychological, behavioral, and social forces that drive MDEs? What roles have and can academics, policy-makers, civil society organizations, consumers, and companies play in combatting MDEs?