August 31, 2007
Not That Anyone Had Any Doubts…
…but today's Washington Post offers more incredibly damning and depressing news about the pernicious way in which big corporate money has continued to consolidate its death grip on the national government in recent years.
"In an attempt to raise the nation's historically low rate of breast-feeding, federal health officials commissioned an attention-grabbing advertising campaign a few years ago to convince mothers that their babies faced real health risks if they did not breast-feed. It featured striking photos of insulin syringes and asthma inhalers topped with rubber nipples.
Plans to run these blunt ads infuriated the politically powerful infant formula industry, which hired a former chairman of the Republican National Committee and a former top regulatory official to lobby the Health and Human Services Department. Not long afterward, department political appointees toned down the campaign."
The report goes one:
"The milder campaign HHS eventually used had no discernible impact on the nation's breast-feeding rate, which lags behind the rate in many European countries."
As the North Carolina General Assembly prepares to convene in special session early next month to consider overriding Governor Easley's veto of a proposed $40 million giveaway to corporate giant, Goodyear Tire & Rubber, the HHS scandal should serve as yet another powerful reminder to progressive lawmakers about the insidious effects of cozy relationships between government and corporations.
No matter what they say about their concern for the common good, when it comes to publicly held corporations in which the maximizing shareholder returns trumps everything, it's all about the money and nothing but the money.
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21 Comments Add yours »
You know, some women are unable to breastfeed for various medical and situational reasons. It seems to me that ads that tell these mothers that they are harming their children are cruel. Are you guys advocating that these mothers should be stigmatized for conditions they have no control over?
Absolutely. Who tipped you off to our plot?
There’s got to be a “suckling at the teet of government” joke in here somewhere.
Anyway, the infant formula industry reacted as anyone else would. They saw their business being threatened and worked the system to protect their interests.
Let’s not let the government off the hook. Seems like their concern for their own interests “trumps everything” in this situation as well. A little pressure from a lobby and all of a sudden their dedication to the “common good” disappears. As Russ Roberts commented about this piece over at Cafe Hayek:
“Don’t expect pigs to fly, cats to bark or politicians to act as if they care about us. They care about us if it helps them prosper. If it doesn’t, they care about more important influences.”
Another thing government should not be spending my money on.
Who should be spending money on it the, Dallas. Serious question:
When the free market gets geared up to sell something that is demonstrably unhealthy and unproductive . . . when companies pull out the stops and push misguided advice . . . who is responsible for correcting the record? Are we each on our own to find the “truth” about infant formulas in the face of hundreds of millions in marketing?
No one makes money telling this kind of truth, so it doesn’t get told. The “free market” has no reliable mechanism for compensating anyone for speaking up against manufacturers. And the media are fully complicit.
Do you simply conclude that it’s tough shit for whoever happens to get suckered by misleading advertising?
first line . . . the = then
Is baby formula “demonstrably unhealthy and unproductive?”
In comparison to breastfeeding? Absolutely, though you have to look hard to find the evidence. Even out here on the Tubes, most of the information presented is sponsored by formula companies. Many articles that appear at first blush to be balanced aren’t. Sort of like Bush’s No Child Left Behind propaganda.
I doubt you’ll put much stock in the decades of research conducted and sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control, but just in case, you can find some reliable facts here.
A few excerpts:
These are just a few facts about the deleterious effects of a free-market in which profits trump public health. And remember, this stuff is from the CDC, which means it’s all been soft-pedaled and watered-down by Republican ideologues before publication.
James, you’ve typed many words. Now if we could return to the question I asked: is baby formula “demonstrably unhealty and unproductive?” I don’t see a thing in your post that responds to that question, nor is there anything in the data you linked to that suggests that formula is dangerous, so I think you could have saved yourself considerable time and trouble by just answering “no.”
That being the case, is it right to imply (as these ads apparently do) that baby formula causes children to develop diabetes and asthma? Can those who created these ads not find a way to extole the virtues of mothers’ milk without resorting to negative propaganda against a legal product that is, in some cases, the most efficacious way to feed an infant?
Maybe we should bring back eugenics to prevent women who are unable to breastfeed from exacerbating the healthcare crisis by producing children who are doomed to a life of diabetes and asthma…
Good grief, guys. This is not that complicated. Baby formula can be, if properly prepared (not over diluted or mixed with polluted water, etc… as happens too often in many parts of the world) a helpful substitute when breast milk is not available. It is better than sweetened cow’s milk or sugar water or lots of other substitutes that have been used through the years. Nobody’s disputing this.
It is, however, far inferior to breastmilk and to the extent that moms can breastfeed their kids, the science shows that the kids will generally be better off — often dramatically so. We’ve known this for decades. More moms need to know this.
Formula is also pretty doggone expensive and a heckuva lot of lower income moms are wasting huge amounts of money (and finding themselves tempted to dilute the stuff) only because no one ever really explained to them the benefits of breastfeeding. Does breastfeeding work for everyone? Obviously not, but it could work for millions more with a little societal efforts and the industry knows this.
Given this simple and straightforward reality and the realities of modern advertising (in which people have become so jaded that watered down public service ads have little or no effect) it was extremely refreshing to learn that public officials were thinking in an entrepreneurial fashion (just like the right likes to complain that they never do) and had produced some edgier ads that would actually engage some moms –particularly those who are less likely to have as much access to counseling, pre-natal care etc….
(As an aside, nobody’s trying to make mom’s who can’t breast feed feel bad — if anything, it seems likley that such moms would be encouraged to be extra vigilant by such ads to do whatever else they could to lessen any other risk factors to which their kids might be exposed. If there was a potential problem in this regard, however, it’s clear the ads could have been edited without being turned into milquetoast. In any event the feelings of such moms were not what was driving the formula industry’s intervention.)
To then learn that the giant and powerful formula industry — a group that has a proven record of affirmatively convincing third world moms NOT to breastfeed (often with disastrous results) –was using its insider clout to censor ads that might have had an impact on American moms and their kids is incredibly discourgaing. It’s also provides a powerful reminder that, absent strong lobbying and ethics laws, there are tremendous incentives for market participants to do and spend whatever it takes to get government on their side.
You guys love to blame industry for spending too much money to influence policy and claim that we need more laws to control the free market. The irony is that it is precisely because we have so much government interference in the free market that it becomes necessary for industry to spend money in order to protect the interests of its employees and customers. You guys have handcuffed the invisible hand and then try to claim the free market has failed. We need less government and more free flow of ideas and information so that consumers can decide what ventures fail or succeed and less government interference that does nothing but distort the market and lead to poor choices (both public and private).
Handcuffed the invisible hand?
Breath the air in China – that’s the quality of the unfettered free market.
Are there any women commenting here? Just interested…
My two cents – sure, some mothers can’t breastfeed, but as any pediatrician will tell you, it’s the best option if you can – even if you supplement with formula. The benefits are tremendous.
Conservatives are getting beaten up enough these days. You’d think they’d want their kids to have every advantage to rebuild the movement, but I guess here it’s just another case of ideology triumphing over common sense.
Finally, another major issue with breastfeeding is a class one. Work in a hourly-wage job and you have few opportunities to pump milk for your kid. Work at the same company’s headquarters in the executive suite and they may have a special “lactation room” set aside for you. Seems like more opportunities for women in the workforce to be able to breastfeed should be a key component of reform too.
The NYT did a nice article on the issue last year:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/01/health/01nurse.html?ex=1189051200&en=e0897ec4538fa90a&ei=5070
“Breath the air in China – that’s the quality of the unfettered free market.”
On what planet is there a China that is in ANY sense (especially economic) “free?”
At least Rob understands that formula isn’t poison. Now if he could only grasp why it’s not good policy for government to effectively lie to the public (know why they call ‘em “edgier?” They’re right on the edge of deception) about a product that has a useful, albiet limited, role.
From the US Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality:
“We found that a history of breastfeeding was associated with a reduction in the risk of acute otitis media, non-specific gastroenteritis, severe lower respiratory tract infections, atopic dermatitis, asthma (young children), obesity, type 1 and 2 diabetes, childhood leukemia, sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), and necrotizing enterocolitis. There was no relationship between breastfeeding in term infants and cognitive performance.
The relationship between breastfeeding and cardiovascular diseases was unclear. Similarly, it was also unclear concerning the relationship between breastfeeding and infant mortality in developed countries.â€
On the infant mortality scale, I’ll just note that the US ranks at an embarrassingly high level — we do a significantly worse job than places like Portugal or Malta.
Looks to me like the debate should be about how to keep more kids healthy in the US.
By encouraging breastfeeding, we’ll save money for the health system, get more kids in school and ready to learn, and improve our health system. There’s no reason the United States has to accept being anything less than number one in the world on this issue.
“By encouraging breastfeeding, we’ll save money for the health system, get more kids in school and ready to learn, and improve our health system.”
A noble end indeed. Let’s just watch our means.
What y’all don’t know about breastfeeding could fill the Grand Canyon. Want to wrap this one up with a modicum of dignity? Not that it’s not amusing, but seriously…
How would you know, what any of us knows or doesn’t know about breastfeeding? We’ve been discussing the propriety (or lack thereof) of government-sponsored commercials attacking baby formula.
Hmmm, as far as I can tell breastfeeding is on the comeback. We didn’t need taxpayer dollars going to the gov’t propaganda machine to inform people about the benefits of breastmilk. My little boy nurses and that was a choice our family made. But we didn’t need the nanny state to tell us about the tradeoffs of formula. Heck, I was given formula — as I’m sure many of us were.
Adam, Rob and the gang paint a rather ridiculous picture of life without THE GOVERNMENT STUDY as some shoot-em-up free-market freeforall in which babies end up drinking Mr. Burns slurry only to coughing up asthmatic rheum and inject themselves with insulin for the rest of their lives. (I’ll pass over Adam’s egregious causation-correlation problem in the above post.)
In any event, I’m sure there there are no shortage of Le Leche fetishists out there like my wife who will be happy to contribute resources to commission a study on the benefits of breastmilk. We don’t need Uncle Sam to tell us what to feed our babies, nor do we need Andrea V to tell us. The internet accesses the Grand Canyon, after all.
Max, Andrea was just expressing herself. She didn’t mean for it to come out sour.