Infant-formula lobby shows its power
by Katie Allison Granju
In 2000, the federal Department of Health and Human Services announced an ambitious plan to launch a $40 million, multimedia ad campaign designed to increase breastfeeding rates in the United States. In years past, various individual government agencies, hospitals, and private organizations such as La Leche League International have attempted to counter the advertising sledgehammer wielded by the $3 billion U.S. infant formula industry via a patchwork of relatively low-budget, smaller-scale ads focusing on the "the benefits of breastfeeding." However, the DHHS breastfeeding campaign was to be the first national effort to utilize high-end, commercial-quality production values to position the "breast is best" public health message to go head-to-head with even the slickest Madison Avenue-produced infant formula ads.
In much of the rest of the world, ads for infant formula directed at consumers are verboten in much the same way that television ads for cigarettes and liquor are no longer acceptable in the United States. This global aversion to infant formula advertising is due to the widespread adoption by governments and private industries outside the United States of the World Health Organization's Code on the Marketing of Breastmilk Substitutes—known as the WHO Code. In this country, however, there is only minimal adherence to the WHO Code by public or private entities, and as a result, advertisements for different brands of infant formula are a ubiquitous part of the U.S. media landscape.
However, it wasn't just the top-notch production values that were to have made this advertising campaign different; this was to be the first time that breastfeeding was to be promoted by focusing�on the risks of not breastfeeding as opposed to the benefits of choosing to breastfeed, a change that makes sense, according to epidemiologists who have studied the dramatic differences in health outcomes between populations of breast and bottle-fed babies in the United States, even�after controlling for socioeconomic and other factors.
Clearly, this was not a campaign that was going to play well with the powerful infant formula industry, which has until now managed to create a uniquely advantageous situation in which it has positioned itself as the primary spokesman for its chief competitor in the marketplace, breastfeeding. And this new message is assuredly not the one they want projected into public consciousness. As soon as they became aware of the content of the planned ads, the drug companies that make and sell baby milk—such as Mead Johnson—became a full-court press to change the content and release dates of the ad campaign or kill the initiative altogether.
According to a variety of sources, members of Congress began hearing complaints about the pending ad campaign from infant formula manufacturers as early as the first week of October, but it was at the AAP convention in November that the industry was able to aim what is arguably the biggest weapon in its lobbying arsenal—the clout of the American Academy of Pediatrics—directly at the breastfeeding campaign. On Nov. 3, his very first day in office, the new president of the 66,000-member AAP sent a letter to DHHS secretary Tommy Thompson objecting to the "negative tone" of the upcoming campaign. He sent the letter even though he admits that the only specific information he had on the ads' content was what he had been shown by infant formula lobbyists at a private meeting earlier that week.
Public health advocates and many individual physicians, nurses, midwives, and lactation consultants have long criticized the cozy financial ties between infant formula manufacturers and major medical organizations such as the AAP, the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Family Physicians, and the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology. The infant formula industry—part of the larger pharmaceutical industry lobby—is also recognized as one of the most effective and powerful lobbies on Capitol Hill.
"It is simply not appropriate for these companies to have a say in how publicly-funded health education campaigns present breastfeeding issues," says Marsha Walker, RN, IBCLC, and Executive Director of the National Alliance for Breastfeeding Advocacy (NABA), a non-profit group promoting breastfeeding.
Today, the status of the planned ad campaign, which has already cost taxpayers millions, is in limbo. DHHS officials have reaffirmed their commitment to the ads after a massive letter-writing campaign was launched in support of the initiative, but the agency refuses to name a release date or offer any specifics with regard to what elements of the ads' message have been changed in response to the infant formula industry's lobbying efforts.
According to Dr. Larry Gartner, head of the AAP's 800-member Professional Section on Breastfeeding, pediatricians across the country are very disturbed by the ethical implications of what is happening with this issue. He also says that the formula industry's complaints about a "negative" tone in the ads are just red herring, designed to delay and water down the campaign for as long as possible.
Katie Allison Granju is the author of Attachment Parenting: Instinctive Care for Your Baby and Young Child (Simon and Schuster/1999). Her blog is at www.locoparentis.blogspot.com.
January 22, 2003 * Vol. 14, No. 4
© 2004 Metro Pulse
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