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Ioannis Hodges-Mameletzis's Blog
Country: United Kingdom
Organisation: University of Oxford
Blog link: http://www.3four50.com/blog/ioannishodges-mameletzis
London 2012: can there be a public health impact?
1st Jun 2010
This morning I attended an amazing talk at the Institute of Physics in London, hosted by C3 Collaborating for Health, on the likely public health impact of the London 2012 Olympics. The talk, given by Prof. Tony Capon from the Australian National University, focused on issues that promote healthy, sustainability urban communities - and ways in which an Olympic Games could be used as a vehicle to go about this.
The discussion in the Q&A that followed after Prof. Capon’s insightful presentation was very engaging – as I expected (this guy was by the way excellent). There was one person in the audience that, for me, raised the interesting issue over how McDonald's, Coca-Cola, and Cadbury's, as the three big commercial sponsors of the London 2012 Games, are fundamentally at odds with what a sound, public health message (i.e. one that promotes healthy eating) should entail. This person was Prof. Theresa Marteau, a psychologist from King's College whose own research focuses on risk Communication and Behaviour. Prof. Marteau’s very good point made me question whether such a public health message, at least from a social marketing standpoint, would prove ineffective in the long-run. In other words, for the sake of the Olympics, do we set aside the gospel of locally sourced, whole foods and simply focus on the importance of physical activity to British population?
Probably yes. At some level, this makes a lot of sense. The celebration of sport is at the heart of the Olympics. The benefits of a serious public health plan based on social marketing (linked to the formulation of real policy), whereby we promote physical activity through organised sport in London and the rest of the UK, may prove enormous. This could also outweigh the cost of being exposed to that profoundly annoying Ronald McDonald for any Olympic fortnight.
Looking past the social marketing approach, structural interventions can also play a long-term role in increasing physical activity, and consequently, in the impact of chronic disease prevention at the population level. This is clearly the premise of the work carried out by the CIH (Community Interventions for Health) initiative. Interestingly, in the context of the 2004 Summer Olympics, my own hometown of Athens has inherited (in addition to the hefty price tag for staging the Games) an underground railway system – the Metro, which most of my fellow Athenians would agree in saying that it has in fact enhanced our quality of life. We are talking about a city where, traditionally, the vast majority of its residents have driven (everywhere, even if it’s only 200m to get a pack of cigarettes at the corner kiosk). The Metro and the revitalisation of the city centre, especially in the area around the base of the Akropolis, have collectively served as structural interventions that have allowed many Athenians to embrace their city in the absence of a Volkswagen. This, for me, is a tangible, positive legacy of the Olympic Games.
As London looks at its own legacy, beyond 2012, we have to start to ask very serious questions. Past the construction of the venues, what will this legacy mean for the community in Stratford? Can the Olympics serve as the impetus to address some of the inherent social class disparities in health across British society – and can organised sports programmes (i.e. targeting youth from disadvantaged communities) be a starting point? From a structural intervention perspective, can we get London to develop into a bike-friendly capital, as successfully demonstrated by cities such as Copenhagen? And, can we actually move beyond dialogue and into real public health action?
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