Politics versus Accuracy
by Kate Kahn - 04th September 2007
Politics are rearing their ugly head again. You may have heard about a controversial Health and Human service ad campaign to promote breastfeeding. The campaign itself happened a few years ago but it’s now making news for all the wrong reasons. This is going to be a long entry so please bear with me.
The original ad campaign featured pictures of syringes with insulin bottles, and baby bottles with inhalers inside instead of breast milk or formula. Yes, you read this right. It’s unbelievable that in this day and age our government would employ such scare tactics to promote something as peaceful as breastfeeding. But there it is.
Needless to say the International Formula Council lobbied to tone down the ads, not because it doesn’t want to promote breastfeeding, but rather, based on lack of scientific accuracy! There’s certainly no definitive proof that not feeding your child breast milk leads to obesity (and by implication feeding your child formula does) and therefore that will lead to diabetes. Come on! Yes, we have an obesity problem in this country. But whether your child has a proclivity towards obesity has nothing to do with what you feed him or her as an infant as two recent studies in the International Journal of Obesity and the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition have shown.
The ads were toned down and those frightening images, which prey on the vulnerability of new mothers-to-be, were removed. Even senior officials in HHS defended the decision saying the ads didn’t fully support the claims. The head of the government’s National Institute of Child Health and Human Development jumped on board saying, “Our concern was that the campaign was going to discredit itself if it included these things---these wild claims really---that had no sufficient basis in science.”
The reason this is all coming to light now is because of last month’s testimony in Congress by former Surgeon General, Richard Carmona. During his testimony, Carmona said that the Bush administration repeatedly acquiesced to political influence at the expense of Carmona’s efforts to promote public health. I don’t know about all the other times that may have happened. But, when it comes to this case, it certainly wasn’t about trying to promote political gain over public health. It was simply about trying to promote accuracy rather than scare tactics. That’s something our government should champion.
Yes, I’m done.
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