Center for Consumer Freedom

Attendees of the annual American Public Health Association (APHA) convention this week are getting more than they bargained for. In addition to the usual presentations on everything from AIDS prevention to asthma epidemiology, the APHA is offering seminars on subjects usually reserved for the animal rights crowd and the food police.

This is hardly a surprise. The public health field in general has been invaded by social-change activists of various stripes in recent years. The APHA actually has a “socialist caucus” that sponsored more than 300 meetings and papers at this year’s conference, including a business meeting with the ominous (and false) title: “Corporate Greed is Destroying the Health of People Worldwide.”

Yesterday, APHA conference-goers were offered a seminar on “Antibiotics in U.S. Agriculture” led by a team of three activists.

These include Tamar Barlam, who works for the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI); David Wallinga, who attacks industrial agriculture from his post at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP); and Ellen Silbergeld, whose department at Johns Hopkins University recently spawned the anti-business Center for a Livable Future (CLF), using six-figure donations from a scientifically illiterate socialite.

CSPI and IATP both participate in a public-relations stunt called “Keep Antibiotics Working,” whose goal is to convince an unsuspecting public that their meat and poultry could harbor dangerous antibiotic residues. Johns Hopkins’ CLF isn’t a member (yet), but its benefactress Helaine Lerner has enrolled her other pet project, the Global Resource Action Center for the Environment.

This morning, the APHA conference is presenting a panel discussion called “The Obesity Crisis: Challenging the Fast Food Culture.” The APHA’s president, Faye Wong, is scheduled to moderate this session personally, signaling its relative importance within the organization.

The speakers are a “who’s who” of the soda wars, including:

• “natural” food maven Marion Nestle, who writes in her recent book Food Politics that food producers should “attract the same kind of attention as purveyors of drugs or tobacco”;
  
  

• Occidental College’s Robert Gottlieb, whose Urban and Environmental Policy Institute convinced the Los Angeles Unified School District this year to ban soft drinks from schools;
  
  

• Andrea Margolis, who advocated punitive taxes on soft drinks as a consultant to the Health and Human Services Committee of the California Senate -- and whose bosses, state legislators Deborah Ortiz and Martha Escutia, made misguided attempts during the last two years to simultaneously tax sodas state-wide and ban them from all California schools;
  
  

• Harold Goldstein, whose California Center for Public Health Advocacy was the primary lobbying organization behind the Ortiz bill.
  
  

Any understanding of how social activists are conspiring to restrict Americans’ food and beverage choices is incomplete without factoring in the “public health” community. Academics and government bureaucrats, informed by anti-capitalist and socialist ideologies, are banding together to remake our society in their own image. This inevitably will involve telling the rest of us what we can and can’t eat and drink.

And they’ve got access to an enormous amount of money. Estimating the size of Big Public Health’s purse is difficult, but here are a few guideposts. The Public Health Foundation estimates that $8.8 billion was spent in 1995 on public-health programs by just nine states. Tobacco settlement funds alone will mean $206 billion for state public health agencies in coming years. APHA asked the federal government last year for an additional $10 billion in public health spending. The feds already pour over $70 billion annually into various public health projects. And none of this includes university funds.