4 Ways Profit-Hungry Global Industries Make People Sick

It's now more commonly known that alcohol and tobacco use make us ill. Less known is that just four industries account for at least one-third of global preventable deaths. These industries are unhealthy processed food and drinks, fossil fuels, alcohol and tobacco. Collectively they cause 19 million deaths every year, according to a recent series of reports published in The Lancet, which unpack the commercial determinants of health, and how they affect public health.

These deaths happen because of accepted business practices that prioritise profit over health - and not only through the companies' products, writes writes Teurai Rwafa for The Conversation. Cigarettes that cause cancer, sugary drinks that result in obesity or coal that drives carbon dioxide emissions are all examples. The world's largest commercial companies routinely operate in a way that masks their practices and allows them to continue and expand in the name of neoliberal economic freedoms.

These transnational corporations drive rapidly rising sickness and death levels, disability, environmental damage, and widening social inequities. The Lancet series describes a "pathological system" in which a substantial group of commercial actors are increasingly enabled to cause harm and to make others pay the costs of doing so. They profit without bearing any of the costs of the harmful products marketed to an unsuspecting public.