Mexico's Growing Childhood Obesity Challenge
2012
This case considers how Mexico can develop effective and politically feasible policies to combat childhood obesity. Dr. Hernandez, the Ministry of Health (MOH) division director of Child Health has just returned from a week long UN meeting on noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) that ended with an official UN declaration demanding governments put into place specific NCD prevention and control targets. Even at the meeting, Dr. Hernandez’s peers had criticized Mexico’s efforts on preventing childhood obesity inadequate. What could be done? He wondered what health interventions would have the most impact. Yet, he also worried about political ramifications. Would such efforts antagonize Mexico’s trade partners? How could he ensure that an anti-obesity initiative would take priority over other efforts that had more immediate and concrete economic returns? His team had to prepare an innovative plan that would have a real impact on the childhood obesity crisis but that could still be justified both in terms of cost (particularly in the short-term) and politics.
This case was used for the 2012 Global Health Case Competition at Emory University. Student teams made up of multi-disciplinary members present solutions to complex scenarios. In these situations, as is often true in real life, there is no one perfect solution but rather one that involves compromising and prioritizing. Cases from past competitions are available through the Emory Global Health Institute.
Mexico's Growing Childhood Obesity Challenge
Source:
Mexico’s Growing Childhood Obesity Challenge. Global Health Institute, Emory University 2012. https://www.globalhealth.emory.edu/students/case-competitions/archives.html.