Did CDC use their authority to lobby for their own funding? Typicalbureaucracy

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/deirdr...e_b_94720.html

CDC Under Siege
Posted April 2, 2008 04:45 PM (EST)

When American scholar Warren Bennis said, "Bureaucracies are beautiful
mechanisms for the evasion of responsibilities and guilt," he might
well have been speaking of the current state of affairs inside the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Once revered around the world, hardly a month passes without another
news report questioning the credibility, scientific independence, and
integrity of the nation's premier health agency.

Over the past four years headlines frequently chronicle a disturbing
litany of allegations charging top CDC officials with wasting money on
questionable research priorities, public relations stunts, distorting
or ignoring health concerns raised by their own scientists, and
retaliation against those who object to the censorship of scientific
findings.

The past three years have been particularly unpleasant for CDC
Director, Dr. Julie Gerberding, but apparently not as bad as she and
her managers are making it for many CDC scientists.

In 2005, alarmed at the rapid decline in morale and concerned for the
credibility of the agency, five former CDC directors sent Dr.
Gerberding a letter complaining that the agency's politicization was
jeopardizing its national and international reputation.

You would think criticisms like this would result in a re-evaluation
by top CDC officials, but apparently not. The frustration of long time
officials was raised again in an Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC)
article, "Exodus, Morale Shake CDC" (Sept. 10, 2006). The article
quotes Dr. Stephen Cochi, an advisor in the CDC's Global Immunization
Division, who said, "The capacity of the CDC to [tackle public health
problems] has seriously eroded in a very short time...The American
people need to be concerned."

As troubling and often embarrassing revelations continued to plague
the CDC, some believed the agency is simply an example of bureaucratic
incompetence. Others, inside and out, suggest something far worse.
Accusations about manipulation of research data, suppression of safety
information, even suggestions of scientific fraud has created a
"crisis in confidence" among CDC officials, resulting in scientists
leveling harsh criticisms regarding the agency's priorities and asking
if its actions, or inactions, are actually putting the public's health
at risk.

Chief among the complaints from scientists and citizen's groups has
been the way the agency continually disputes, downplays or ignores
scientific findings, often from some of their own researchers, and
fails to draw any conclusions, or "links," between environmental/
industrial pollution and chronic diseases affecting the American
public, particularly children.

These criticisms have been voiced for several decades. An example of
how the agency can design a study so that it fails to link disease and
pollution can be found in the way the CDC investigated the cancer
clusters in Fallon, Nevada and Sierra Vista, Arizona. In a 2006
article published in The Tucson Weekly, the CDC's "foot-dragging" and
unscientific methods used to investigate the clusters raised serious
questions about the study's integrity and the agency's credibility and
commitment to protecting the public's health. In describing the CDC's
slow reaction to the life and death situations, it is not difficult to
see how many would level accusations of "cover-up" to describe the
"faulty manner" in which the agency responded to the cluster
investigations.

The CDC itself admits the agency repeatedly fails to identify, or
connect, environmental chemicals to these clusters. Quoting from the
CDC website, "From 1961 to 1982, CDC investigated 108 reported cancer
clusters in 29 states and 5 foreign countries...The studies were begun
in hopes of identifying a viral cause of cancer clusters. During these
investigations, however no clear cause was determined for any of the
reported clusters."

Two of the latest in a long list of reported controversies dogging the
beleaguered agency involves the delayed disclosure of a 400-page study
conducted in the Great Lakes region and the demotion of the study's
chief scientist, Christopher De Rosa, a director of the CDC's Agency
for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) since 1992.

Released in early February by the Center for Public Integrity, a
nonprofit journalism organization, the study found exposures to PCB's,
lead, mercury, dioxin, pesticides and other toxins may have caused
"low birth weights, elevated rates of infant mortality and premature
births, and elevated death rates from breast cancer, colon cancer and
lung cancer."

In an article accompanying the study, "Great Lakes Danger Zone,"
reporter Sheila Kaplan, interviewed Canadian biologist Dr. Michael
Gilbertson, one of the study's reviewers. Dr. Gilbertson explained,
"The whole problem with all this kind of work is wrapped up in that
word 'injury.' If you have injury, that implies liability. Liability,
of course, implies damages...The governments, frankly, in both
countries [US and Canada] are so heavily aligned with, particularly,
the chemical industry, that the word amongst the bureaucracies is that
they really do not want any evidence of effect or injury to be allowed
out there."

In response to the CDC's handling of the report, Michigan
Representatives John Dingell, Chairman of the Committee on Energy and
Commerce, and Bart Stupack, Chairman of the Oversight and
Investigations Subcommittee launched a congressional investigation
charging the agency with a "Cover-Up." In a statement released on
February 28th 2008, Chairman Dingell wrote, "If the administration has
willfully withheld a report from the public, it raises questions about
whether they are putting the public health at risk and about the
scientific integrity of the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention."

The release of the Great Lakes study comes on the heels of new
accusations charging top CDC officials with down playing cancer risks
posed by formaldehyde exposure found in the 144,000 trailers purchased
by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) for victims of
Hurricane Katrina.

In a February 8, 2008 article in the AJC, "CDC under investigation
over Katrina cancer risk," investigative journalist Alison Young
reported the House Committee on Science and Technology has begun
investigating "disturbing allegations" of improper suppression of
"critical information" and "also looking into whether the Atlanta
scientist who sought to make the risks public has been the subject of
retaliation by the agency." This individual would be the same CDC
scientist leading the Great Lakes study, Dr. Christopher De Rosa.

The article cites a letter sent to Director Gerberding from the
Committee's chairman and two other subcommittee chairmen stating, "The
agency's conduct has called into question its ability to investigate
public health hazards accurately and appropriately in the future."
Again, suggestions that liability, rather than the health of the
people living in the trailers, seemed to be the primary concern of
FEMA and CDC officials.

Cleaning up toxic chemicals in the environment can cost businesses a
great deal of money. Liability for the diseases caused by these
chemicals can cost business even more money. Today's political
climate, inside the CDC and out, is not interested in holding
corporations accountable for anything, even allowing toxic pollutants
to poison our children. This would explain why we have a nation of
sick kids and why only a few in government seem interested in doing
anything about it.

And if the suppression of safety data and intimidation of agency
scientists raising health concerns were not bad enough, the CDC also
stands accused of hyping certain health threats and terrifying the
public in the hope of benefiting from the "fear" campaigns. Sandwiched
between the Great Lakes and FEMA trailer "cover-up" reports, another
article by the AJC asks "Did CDC hype TB case as a fund-raising
ploy?" (March 13, 2008).

The article chronicles the hysteria created over 31-year-old Atlanta
attorney, Andrew Speaker, a man CDC officials diagnosed with XDR TB
five months after an agency "strategy" session focused on obtaining
more funding for the rare and deadly form of TB.

According to the article, "The handling of the Speaker case was so
unusual that it has raised questions among other TB experts, including
whether CDC publicized Speaker's case in a quest for more money."

While the CDC's Media Relations Director Glen Nowak maintains "the
agency's actions were justified," the agency "has refused for nearly
seven months to release documents under the Freedom of Information Act
(FOIA) about any role the agency's XDR TB funding strategy played in
its handling of the Speaker case." As it turns out, Speaker didn't
even have the deadly XDR TB. All that hype and the young man had a
different, "more treatable" form of TB all along.

It's a little disturbing that the world's leading health agency would
misdiagnose the type of tuberculosis this man has. Makes you wonder
how often situations like this are sensationalized way out of
proportion and sending the public into a panic. Anyone remember
monkeypox? When was the last time you heard about that? And what has
become of that deadly bird flu that dominated the news for about a
year? Ever notice how the urgent predictions of impending disaster
disappear after the CDC gets a big boost in funding from congress to
combat these diseases?

We know every year the CDC and health officials claim 36,000 people
die from influenza. This little piece of propaganda is spread annually
by medical reporters on all the morning and nightly news programs. But
does anyone ever ask these so-called "experts" to prove this
statistic? No...talk show hosts and medical reporters just regurgitate
the "talking points" with no interest in accuracy.

For anyone interested, investigative journalist Kelly O'Meara actually
did ask "how does the CDC arrive at its numbers of deaths related to
influenza?" In an article for the Washington Times Insight Magazine,
CDC spokesman Curtis Allen admited the 36,000 deaths "are not 'real'
numbers" and are actually nothing more that a computer generated
guess. "There are a couple problems with determining the number of
deaths related to the flu because most people don't die from the
influenza...We don't know exactly how many people get the flu each
year because it's not a reportable disease and most physicians don't
do the test [nasal swab] to indicate whether it's influenza."

In a follow up article "A Shot In the Dark - Part I," using the CDC's
own data, O'Meara found "The greatest number of actual inluenza deaths
recorded since 1979 were 3,006 in 1981."

I found both these stories with a simple Google search, something
medical reporters and their interviewers might want to try. (Flu
Secrets You Should Know 2/3/04).

Although never held accountable for these misrepresentations, top CDC
officials have consistently shown themselves to be quite creative at
exploiting certain health threats, like TB, influenza and bird flu,
when it suits their purposes, and ignoring other health threats, like
childhood cancer and autism, when it doesn't. How do they keep getting
away with this stuff?

Read Mo Andrew Speaker, Andrew Speaker Tb, Andrew Speaker
Tuberculosis, Autism, Autism Vaccine Mercury, Autism Vaccines, Cdc,
CDC Cancer, Centers For Disease Control, Centers For Disease Control
And Prevention, David Kirby, Gerberding, Hannah Poling, Hannah Poling
Autism, Health, Public Health, Tb, Tuberculosis, Breaking Living News