A Lesson in Public Health (edited)

[Guest guest]

Last year, the CDC announced that fat was the Number 2 preventable

killer of Americans, ranked just behind smoking. Also last year, the

CDC quietly announced that its numbers on the subject were wrong. Not

that the corrections made the front page like " the obesity epidemic " ,

of course. And not that the news was worthy of stronger retraction

PRIOR to a round of congressional funding, a few major lawsuits, and

a clamor in the public education system for what literally amount to

government-mandated changes in the diets of school children.

Now, before you jump me for going off topic, just hang on for a

moment. I'm going to show you why this topic is important to people

like us.

In the article linked below, you'll get the full story, but I'm going

to warn you ahead of time that key personnel at the CDC knew the

numbers were bad years ago, due to inconsistent calculations and

research methodology. This was also true of personnel at the National

Center for Health Statistics. Now the CDC claims that people who

are " moderately overweight " actually outlive people of

" normal weight " . WHAT?! Yup. And get this - the Director, Dr.

Gerberding, is listed as an author on the original reports. That was

a pretty good trick, considering she was never directly connected to

the Center where the numbers were crunched, and that she spent much

of that year running off to China during the SARS scare and giving

press conferences both there and at home, even doing a fashion

article for Vogue magazine while in China, internally reorganizing the

entire agency, and overseeing construction of several new buildings

at the CDC's main campus in Georgia.

Despite being a real go-getter - not to mention attractive,

vivacious, and a past master at handling the press - even Dr.

Gerberding can't be everywhere, doing everything, at once. Even

Christ flipped out when left amongst the lepers for too long. That's

why he had desciples. There's a lot of grunt work involved with

healing the sick and changing people's minds. But this is normal.

Senior staff get to claim authorship, whether or not they ever penned

a single word of those reports - often much to the chagrin and

private sniping of the folks who do the actual writing. Wouldn't you

think heavyweight authorship like that would hold a little sway when

the Internal Review Board looked over the report? Nahhh.

Unfortunately for her, though, in this case the report was dead

wrong. Or maybe not so dead wrong, consdering deaths from

ovbesity were ratcheted waaaayyy down from an intitial 400,000 to

just a bit over 25,000. And for some reason, either no one told her,

or else she didn't listen.

So why should we care? Well, it's our tax money. Each time a public

health agency declares " The Disease of the Decade " , millions upon

millions of dollars go into funding The Fight Against [insert disease

here]. Who decides what will be The Disease of the Decade? Well, it's

kind of a consensus thing. If the Surgeon General and the Secretary

of Health and Welfare (then Tommy ), and the Directors of the

CDC and NCHS come together on an idea - you've got yourself a

Disease, with a capital " D " . And Tommy loved to be seen as

part of the health-conscious, exercising, weight-focused set. In the

60's, President Kennedy wanted to see more exercise, and we got

children in public schools being fitness-tested every year. The

military put virtually everyone on a new fitness regime. In the 70's,

we had both a War on Drugs and The Fight Against Heart Disease.

(Years later, the CDC finally admitted that moderate alcohol

consumption was actually good for the heart, claiming that they

waited to say anything for fear people would take their advice and

start drinking too much. True story.) Then, the 80's saw AIDS. You

get the picture. The Fight Against Prostate Cancer was doing pretty

well this decade, but I doubt we've seen the end of The Fight Against

Obesity. The money has been spent, and the troops deployed.

The effect of all this on us is perhaps indirect, but incredibly

costly nonetheless. Only last year, the government listed preventable

causes of death as:

1) tobacco;

2) poor diet and inactivity, leading to excess weight;

3) alcohol;

4)germs;

5) toxins and pollutants;

6) car crashes;

7) guns;

8) risky sexual behavior; and

7) illicit drugs.

With the corrected information, overweight drops to seventh place -

bringing toxins and pollutants back up in the rankings ahead of

weight. And during all this time, those with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

(Myalgic Encephalomyelitis) have bee estimated as high as 2 million,

with zero increase in research funding for years. MCS or Lyme? Pretty

much the same. Gulf War Illness? Still being treated like a case of

mass hysteria. I won't even go into what happens when the quality of

a person's life reaches what the government considers to be

worthless, but fails to outright die on their own. We've seen plenty

on that lately, a la Schiavo. And we haven't even touched on toxins

and pollutants (including fungal disease) - something which is now

admitted to rank as the 4th greatest preventable killer of people in

this country!

The government, per se, hardly every cures anything at all. This work

is far more often done by individual researchers and clinicians, and

most often in a university setting. What the federal and state

governments do, is operate campaigns of public awareness. The posters

you've seen on walls in government health agancies and doctors'

offices, the ad campaigns you hear on the radio, the television spots

done by celebrity spokespersons, etc. Got a Disease of the Decade?

Any decade? I guarantee you, somebody's walking for a cure. You

probably can tell your closest friends or family you've got it, and

have some reason to believe they've at least heard of it. And believe

it actually exists. And maybe, that they even have a couple of sound

bite-inspired factoids at hand. (They probably picked those up from

their kids, who had a little poster contest at school last year.)

And that, friends, is where we end up paying the freight. When you

find someone looking at you like you've lost your mind as you try to

explain. When your own doctor wants to send you to a shrink instead

of treating you. When your family is mad because you didn't show up

for the last holiday gathering. When SSDI turns you down. When email

lists and online groups are filled with people trying remedies that

didn't work 10 years ago, either. When your mortgage goes into

default. When you give up a beloved pet because you can no longer

care for them. When you leave everything you own behind to get to a

safer environment - even if that place is your car. When friends say

you're just obsessed.

Well then, YOU just paid the freight.

Click here to see the original article:

http://story.news./news?

tmpl=story & cid=541 & e=3 & u=/ap/obesity_deaths

Serena

www.freeboards.net/index.php?mforum=sickgovernmentb