Multinational corporations and infectious disease: Embracing human rights management techniques.

Kendyl Salcito,Mark Wielga,Burton H Singer,Mitchell G Weiss,Mirko S Winkler,Jürg Utzinger,Gary R Krieger

doi:10.1186/2049-9957-3-39

Abstract

BackgroundGlobal health institutions have called for governments, international organisations and health practitioners to employ a human rights-based approach to infectious diseases. The motivation for a human rights approach is clear: poverty and inequality create conditions for infectious diseases to thrive, and the diseases, in turn, interact with social-ecological systems to promulgate poverty, inequity and indignity. Governments and intergovernmental organisations should be concerned with the control and elimination of these diseases, as widespread infections delay economic growth and contribute to higher healthcare costs and slower processes for realising universal human rights. These social determinants and economic outcomes associated with infectious diseases should interest multinational companies, partly because they have bearing on corporate productivity and, increasingly, because new global norms impose on companies a responsibility to respect human rights, including the right to health.MethodsWe reviewed historical and recent developments at the interface of infectious diseases, human rights and multinational corporations. Our investigation was supplemented with field-level insights at corporate capital projects that were developed in areas of high endemicity of infectious diseases, which embraced rights-based disease control strategies.ResultsExperience and literature provide a longstanding business case and an emerging social responsibility case for corporations to apply a human rights approach to health programmes at global operations. Indeed, in an increasingly globalised and interconnected world, multinational corporations have an interest, and an important role to play, in advancing rights-based control strategies for infectious diseases.ConclusionsThere are new opportunities for governments and international health agencies to enlist corporate business actors in disease control and elimination strategies. Guidance offered by the United Nations in 2011 that is widely embraced by companies, governments and civil society provides a roadmap for engaging business enterprises in rights-based disease management strategies to mitigate disease transmission rates and improve human welfare outcomes.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/2049-9957-3-39) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Highlights

Global health institutions have called for governments, international organisations and health practitioners to employ a human rights-based approach to infectious diseases
This paper proposes a method for broadening multinational corporations’ efforts to control, monitor and eliminate infectious diseases where they affect societies and businesses, using the Guiding Principles human rights framework
Limitations of a human rights framework without enforcement capabilities A human rights approach to operating in conflict settings has nominally been applied by many extractive companies, through their participation on the Voluntary Principles on Security and Human Rights

Summary

Introduction

Global health institutions have called for governments, international organisations and health practitioners to employ a human rights-based approach to infectious diseases. Governments and intergovernmental organisations should be concerned with the control and elimination of these diseases, as widespread infections delay economic growth and contribute to higher healthcare costs and slower processes for realising universal human rights. These social determinants and economic outcomes associated with infectious diseases should interest multinational companies, partly because they have bearing on corporate productivity and, increasingly, because new global norms impose on companies a responsibility to respect human rights, including the right to health. – as – the plight of those affected by disease was not merely physical ill-health, but the social, economic, political and environmental disempowerment that did – and still today does accompany illness

Methods

Results

Conclusion