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February 23, 2005
CCF Airs CDC's Dirty Laundry
Trouble is brewing in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) own back yard. Today, the Atlanta Journal Constitution published an op-ed from the Center for Consumer Freedom calling on the CDC to officially retract its now-debunked study attributing 400,000 annual deaths to poor diet and exercise. Our charge follows a CDC report calling the study has "fundamental" problems.
Trouble is brewing in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) own back yard. Today, the Atlanta Journal Constitution published an op-ed from the Center for Consumer Freedom calling on the CDC to officially retract its now-debunked study attributing 400,000 annual deaths to poor diet and exercise. Our charge follows a CDC report calling the study has "fundamental" problems.
Our op-ed read, in part:
A recently completed internal investigation has revealed that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's calculation of 400,000 deaths caused each year by obesity was flawed to its core, and that the agency ran roughshod over its own scientists. The CDC has thus far failed to publicly acknowledge the extent of its colossal error...Months before the CDC's well-publicized announcement, two studies that undermined the logic of the 400,000 statistic were submitted for publication in major medical journals. Written by a group of obesity experts at the CDC, these critiques suggested the death figure could be off by an order of magnitude...
Having given its imprimatur to what it surely knew was a big fat lie, the CDC must fully retract its fatally flawed study. That may upset every interest banking on misplaced hysteria about obesity. But it will help restore faith in what stood until recently as the nation's most respected government institution.
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