C.7. Scientific session: Commercial determinants of health in times of war, crisis and conflict
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Various types of conflicts and crises define today’s global landscape and cause severe harms worldwide. While often framed as security or governance challenges, this panel examines them through the lens of the commercial determinants of health (CDOH) to explore how health harming industries take advantage of populations and contexts of heightened vulnerability to help create, shape, normalize and profit from crisis conditions. Four related presentations show how industries generate immediate and long-term harms through violence, political influence, market expansion and cultural power, while turning crises into opportunities to consolidate legitimacy and profit. The first presentation sets the stage with an overview of the corporate playbook, and then reveals how the arms industry is both a proximal and distal determinant of morbidity and mortality, generating direct health harms through death, injury, disability, trauma, and environmental destruction, while also exerting indirect influence by diverting public resources from health and social protection, shaping political decisions, and embedding militarism within public life referring to examples from the Middle East. The second presentation explores how war has historically shaped corporate identities, legitimacy and post-war expansion using examples from pharmaceutical, chemical and automobile industries. It also examines the relationship between the commercial film industry and the military-industrial complex, tracing how war accelerated developments in mass media, propaganda and public relations. The third presentation analyzes how the tobacco, fossil fuel, alcohol, digital technology and social media industries create social and epistemic conflict in pursuit of profit, including divisions among researchers and advocates, funding “culture wars,” and fueling anti-regulatory narratives and antagonism toward minority groups. The fourth presentation discusses how the ultra-processed food industry exploits wartime disruption and humanitarian need. It shows how food systems damaged by conflict create new markets for cheap, durable, highly profitable products while worsening nutritional inequities. Historical examples such as a sugar sweetened beverage industry during World War II and contemporary dependence on packaged foods in Gaza illustrate how war can expand markets and entrench unhealthy consumption patterns. Implications for research and policy will be discussed. Key messages • Crises and wars are not only humanitarian disasters; they can become opportunities for harmful industries to expand markets, shape policy, and profit at the expense of health and equity. • Health-harming commodity industries influence conflict, culture and recovery through strategies that normalize harm, consolidate power, and deepen long-term global health inequities.
Author: Jihad Makhoul
Language: English
Field: Medicine
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $3,181
OpenAlex ID: W7223656735