“Today, domestic and transnational corporations influence public health through product safety, marketing, pricing, environmental impact, natural resource use, and occupational health standards”
There are many corporations that only seek to generate income at all costs, that includes the health of the population according to Heather M. Zoller , there is also a long history of conflict between perceived business interests and public health. Early in European and U.S. history, trade ship owners fought against costly ship quarantines by framing contagion theories of health as unscientific and backward (Tesh, [77]).
There is a corporate health risk that impacts inequality in education, Many corporations want part of the population without education because it is financially convenient for them to be the targert of consumers in products, food, medicine, etc.
“More educated people are less likely to be hypertensive, or to suffer from emphysema or diabetes. Physical and mental functioning is also better for the better educated. The better educated are substantially less likely to report that they are in poor health, and less likely to report anxiety or depression. Finally, better educated people report spending fewer days in bed or not at work because of disease, and they have fewer functional limitations.”
The lacune public for unequal education is African American and minorities.
Usually, teachers, students, and parents are the activists on this issue, but usually “Health activists may include health departments, scientists, and members of federal agencies, along with local and regional grass-roots groups, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and social movement organizations (discrete formal organizations that share interests with a larger social movement).”
There are many activists who are successful in their strategies and are an example to follow since they create or have created change in the masses.
“ Illness prevention research often targets individual-level or community-supported lifestyle changes, encouraging targets to do things like avoid or quit smoking, cut down on fast food, or avoid alcohol, rather than changing corporate practices that produce and aggressively market products such as tobacco, fast food, and alcohol. This trend results in part from increasing expectations for grant-funded health communication scholarship. More funding is available for promoting apparently "nonpolitical" lifestyle changes than for facilitating major structural and economic changes.”
“The current configuration of the limited liability corporation presents challenges for activists in opening policy windows. Problems include the diffusion of responsibility endemic to large bureaucratic structures and limited liability laws, which make penalizing wrongdoing difficult; the vast monetary resources that major multinational corporations (MNCs) can use to outmatch activists in terms of advertising, lobbying, and legal strategies; the use of professional public relations staff to promote positive reputations and prevent or repair reputational threats; the corporatized media that report on these issues; and opportunities for covertly externalizing costs (and responsibility) from corporation to society (e.g., the beef industry transfers the environmental costs of concentrated animal feed lots to neighboring communities) (Conrad & Abbott, [10]; Parker, Cheney, Fournier, & Land, [59]; Pojda”( Zoller, Heather M). "
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