The craft of occupational and environmental health presents to global health through a mosaic of issues, diseases, policies, contrasts and maddening contradictions that requires deep quantities of indigenously manufactured public health practitioners and policy makers.
Peer review came about to ensure new scientific claims are vetted by scientists prior to publication. The practice is captured in the Ingelfinger Rule, named for the former editor in chief of the New England Journal of Medicine. This set a standard that respected publications would not publish claims that had been pre-promoted prior to academic review. This process of checking and rechecking any scientific discovery or research claim for accuracy and bias – before it reaches public audiences – serves as a guardrail to prevent the spread of inaccurate or flawed research.
The Heartland Health Research Alliance (HHRA) an ideologically-focused research groups funded by ‘dark money’ support from the organic industry and tort lawyers cashing on on suits against agro-chemical companies has pushed aggressively to influence the media and the scientific community for the stakeholders funding them.
Until the 1990s, research was often low-budget, done in government agencies or industry funded. But as universities acquired expensive analytical technologies, as industry science was labeled as biased, as foundations and activist groups started to fund their own scientists and as the journal publication process changed to a digital, market-driven model, so did the science, the scientist and the scientific method.