The Center for Consumer Freedom filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the CDC to release internal paperwork related to its study proclaiming 400,000 people die each year due to obesity. The agency has just posted that paperwork on its website, and what’s revealed is rather striking. CCF pulls a few relevant exerpts:

“Methods used to calculate number of deaths due to obesity were incorrect and possibly miscalculated … The use of the improper formula is a rather serious mistake to make. At the time this study was being conducted, the scientific literature had several papers describing potential bias. Following Allison et al. [which attributed 300,000 deaths to overweight and obesity per year] in using an incorrect method was not justified. From the cross-clearance, it seems as if this bias from the wrong formula was pointed out to the authors.” (emphasis added)

“The knowledge about inappropriate use of adjusted relative risks in certain attributable-fraction formulas was in the literature prior to the preparation of this manuscript and was apparently shared with the authors prior to publication.” (emphasis added)

More damning, I think, is that the committee investigating the CDC’s errors found that the original committee charged with reviewing the study had significant criticisms of it (criticisms that turned out to be true), which were largely ignored.

That’s because the director of the CDC, Julie Gerberding, was also one of the authors of the study, a conflict the invesgigative committee concludes may have contributed to the study’s wrongful approval.

Even after the errors were pointed out, the CDC submitted a correction to the Journal of the American Medical Association that only took a few mathematical errors into account, not (as CCF points out) the more serious methodological errors. That “correction” revised the death statistics down from 400,000 to 365,000. It wasn’t until the agency asked an entirely different team of scientists — minus Gerberding — to evaluate the data that the 100,000 (or about 25,000 if you count lives saved by modest overweight) deaths-by-obesity figure emerged.

Gerberding’s been one of the most vocal anti-obesity warriors around. Here she is, for example, quoted in a CBS News piece:

“This is tragic,” said Dr. Julie Gerberding, CDC’s director and an author of the study. “Our worst fears were confirmed.”

“It’s going to overtake tobacco” if the trend continues, Gerberding said. “At CDC, we’re going to do everything we can to prevent it,” she said. “Obesity has got to be job No. 1 for us in terms of chronic diseases.”

A Lexis search on “Gerberding” and “400,000″ taken between the time her study was published and the time the CDC published the much-lower figure reveals more than 500 media mentions — she’s certainly been out there touting the threat. And when the head of the CDC talks, you can bet policy makers listen.

After the 100,000/25,000 figure from Katherine Flegal and colleagues was released, Gerberding still refused to embrace the new number, and insisted that the CDC had no plans to alter its aggressive anti-obesity campaign, despite the new study, and her own agency’s conclusion that her study — which in many ways sparked the obesity hysteria — was flat wrong.

So to recap, the director of the United States Center for Disease Control co-authored a flawed study, which led to massive anti-obesity hysteria, including public policy proposals that would have had a significant impact on how we produce, buy, and consume food. Though many of her colleagues knew her methodology was flawed, the study was published anyway, due either to bureaucratic snafus, fear from her colleagues of backlash, or that she simply ignored them (none of which is really acceptable from the agency in charge of protecting us from genuine threats to the public health). She then ignored months of criticism from credible scientists and researchers. When pressed, she revised the figure downward, though only slightly, and in a manner that didn’t really address the crux of the criticism. Finally, an outside group of scientists was asked to conduct an independent study, and found that the real figure was one fifteenth the original. And she still insists that the agency’s anti-obesity awareness campaigns be based upon the original, flawed statistic.

I think you could make a pretty good case that Dr. Julie Gerberding isn’t fit to lead the CDC.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 31st, 2005 at 6:56 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.