Health-harming products are contributing to a global rise in chronic disease. Studies estimate that fossil fuels, chemicals, alcohol, tobacco and ultra-processed foods are now responsible for approximately one in three deaths worldwide. In the US, chronic diseases linked to these products are on the rise, including increases in diabetes, Parkinson’s, cancer and neurodegenerative diseases. Scientists are pointing to an “industrial epidemic” of disease.
The Industry Documents Library at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) is a digital archive of internal documents from corporations across industries that produce these health-harming products. Originally established in 2002 to house documents publicly disclosed in litigation against the tobacco industry in the 1990s, analysis using these documents has generated more than 1,000 peer-reviewed studies, reports and news stories, with their findings revealing firsthand accounts of what the industry knew and when they knew it about the health harms of tobacco.
The library now houses over 20 million documents including internal documents from the pharmaceutical, chemical, food, and fossil fuel industries. The chemical industry archive contains more than 700,00 pages (over 27,000 documents).
UCSF’s Center to End Corporate Harm was launched earlier this year to bring together scientists to more systematically study the mechanisms and strategies corporations use to delay and prevent regulation of their health harming products. The Center is using the archives to develop strategies to counter the destructive influence of polluters and thus reduce chronic disease
In this webinar, Center director Dr. Tracey Woodruff will introduce the concept of “commercial determinants of health,” and outline the Center’s purpose and plans. Industry Documents Library Director Kate Tasker will provide an overview of the Industry Documents Library and how to use it — the documents are fully searchable and accessible to the public. And Dr. Nicholas Chartres, lead scientific advisor to the new Center, will provide examples of the mechanisms and strategies these corporations use to proliferate the sale of their products using published case studies.
CHE Director Kristin Schafer will moderate the session.
Featured Speakers
Kate Tasker is the Director of the UCSF Industry Documents Library. She leads a team to preserve and make publicly accessible millions of documents which shed light on industry influence on public health, including the Truth Tobacco Industry Documents and collections on the opioid, drug, chemical, food, and fossil fuel industries. Kate has a Master's in Library and Information Science from San Jose State University and is a member of the Academy of Certified Archivists.
Nicholas Chartres, PhD, MHumNutr, is a Senior Research Fellow at The University of Sydney. He specializes in studying commercial determinants of health, focusing on chemicals, nutrition and public health. As the lead author of the first in-depth study on how industry sponsorship influences nutrition research, he is an expert in identifying and analyzing industry influence and developing methods to reduce industry bias in the research process. Nick is the lead scientific advisor at the UCSF Center to end Corporate Harm.
Tracey Woodruff, PhD, MPH is the director of UCSF PRHE and UCSF’s Earth Center. She is a leading scientist who has produced seminal research on how harmful chemicals and pollutants impact health, pregnancy, and child development, including the first international study to document the effects of air pollution and preterm birth and the first to document toxic chemicals in pregnant women and newborns. A national expert in chemical and regulatory policy, Dr. Woodruff was a senior scientist and policy advisor for the U.S. EPA’s Office of Policy prior to joining UCSF.