There's an interesting article highlighting a recent controversy with the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). Large amounts of scientific research (see, for example the footnotes in this article) have indicated that breastfeeding is much healthier for babies than feeding them formula. The infant formula industry has crafted the public message as "breastfeeding makes you less prone to these problems..." whereas a research Dept. of Health and Human Services (DHHS) campaign ad was going to switch the message to "infant formula makes you more prone to these problems...." The infant formula industry lobbied the new president of the AAP very heavily, and got him to help prevent the DHHS from running the ads.
One point I found particularly interesting is that the World Health Organization (WHO) has an advertising code which prohibits any advertisements of infant formula. The WHO code has supposedly been adopted by most of the rest of the world, and so infant formula ads are banned in a manner similar to bans on ads for smoking in the US.
I haven't read the literature and so I don't know how strong the differences are in breastfeeding versus infant formula. But this incident does seem to be just yet another example of the sometimes unfortunately heavy influence of private interests on public policy. Don't get me wrong - I'm not saying that private interests shouldn't have an influence on public policy. I'm just saying that their influence is often unduly heavy because their "power" is concentrated in an organization, whereas the general public is more diffuse, and thus has less influence.
Posted by Tom Nugent at December 29, 2003 11:52 AM