Influence of free trade on the politics of safety
- Trauma Foundation, San Francisco General Hospital, San Francisco, California, USA
- Correspondence to: Dr E McLoughlin, San Francisco Injury Center, San Francisco General Hospital, Building 1, Room 400, 1001 Potrero Ave, San Francisco, CA 94110, USA
Why injury prevention is essentially political
When advocating for prevention strategies, public health professionals need to recognize who the stakeholders are and the conflicting values they bring to negotiations. In politics, deals are struck and decisions are made, dependent upon the relative power and valued “goods” held by divergent interested parties. In the politics of safety, it is the responsibility of injury prevention advocates to further the interests of public health and safety as powerfully as possible.
This has never been an easy task and new, widely unrecognized challenges may now make it even harder. The movement towards globalization and unfettered free trade has extreme relevance to the international politics of safety, and for national, regional, and local jurisdictions as well.
Globalization and trade issues may seem far afield from the day to day concerns of the injury prevention community. But colleagues in other fields, like environmental protection, have been active in trying to influence decision making. Injury prevention cannot remain uninvolved.
WHY INJURY PREVENTION IS ESSENTIALLY POLITICAL
In the 1970s, Dr William Haddon proposed that we apply fundamental principles of disease prevention to injury control—host, agent, and environment, as factors amenable to modification, and thus prevention. Efforts to modify host factors through behavior modification are usually politically safe because they place responsibility on the individual to change, not on the corporations that manufacture these products.
Efforts to change agents or vectors, most often consumer products, however, involve decisions about design, manufacture, and sale. These are based on a variety of concerns that sometimes include safety. Debates about how to balance these factors are often contentious, pitting consumer advocates against antiregulatory and proindustry forces. These debates are usually associated with the regulatory and/or legislative process.
HOW TRADE CONSIDERATIONS THREATEN INJURY PREVENTION
Traditionally, establishing health and safety regulations has been the prerogative of national and sometimes regional governments acting on behalf of their …
