Companies should put as much effort into promoting the public health as they do in safeguarding the environment, according to the Edelman Health Engagement Barometer released today at the Annual World Health Care Congress in D.C. 

Businesses have gone “green,” now it’s time to go “health,” says Nancy Turett, chief of the independent firm’s global healthcare practice.

Nearly three-out-of-four (73 percent) of the 15,000 respondents polled equate health with environmental protection as corporate priorities. About two-thirds (65 percent) would either recommend or buy products from a health-oriented company.

Edelman found that youngest age brackets (18-24 year olds) and (25-34) are most concerned about the public health issue.

More than half of respondents (51 percent) expect food and beverage companies to communicate potential risks of their products. Forty-nine percent of respondents expect those companies to address the obesity issue. Developing new products to improve health was cited by 47 percent of survey participants.

Ron Levy (4/13):
We may see PR fireworks because Edelman and other top PR firms have superb healthcare PR practices with media trust worldwide and demonstrated ability to deliver, and Edelman recently brought in Carol Cone, arguably the world's top PR expert on cause-related marketing.

Supporting medical research yields an intensity of public gratitude because one in every three of us will likely die of cancer, about the same number will be hit by heart disease or stroke, most of us have lost relatives to cancer and heart disease, so interest is not just latent but already exists and is strong. There is also taxpayer appeal. As healthcare costs become increasingly frightening--like how can we pay for it all?--one of the best ways to save may be not by further cutting doctors, hospitals and drug companies but by cutting down on heart disease and cancer.

We're already making more progress than many people realize and breakthroughs may be imminent that will bring worldwide media coverage. Example: vaccines. Just as vaccindes prevent polio and other diseases, there are now anti-cancer vaccines that prevent certain women's cancers. What may bring massive media coverage is vaccine research now nearing completion at Stanford University and at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, the world's largest (and perhaps most widely published) team of anti-cancer researhers. Dr. Carol Portlock at Sloan-Kettering is an editor of "Current Oncology Reports." Dr. Craig Moskowitz helps edit "Journal of Cliical Oncology." Many other doctors at this center and others are also writers and editors. Even highly aggressive cancers are increasingly being cured.

Few people know it's possible but Memorial Sloan-Kettering is already curing more than half the agressive lymphoma patients who come for treatment--and over 80% of some childhood cancers.

In Texas, the MD Anderson Cancer Center is developing ways to test anti-cancer drugs in which all patients in a test group receive the drug with no control group receiving only placebos. Cancer centers at the Universities of Rochester, Buffalo and Nebraska and at Georgetown University seem on the edge of stunning breakthroughs.

The potential progress in cancer and other diseases, plus Edelman's findigs on public interest in health, may speed the inclination of companies to "go to health."