WHY WE HAD TO HAVE AN EBOLA CZAR: The CDC’s Dr. Talk Good.
His tenure was marked by a series of health crusades aimed at so-called “lifestyle diseases” based on dubious evidence.
Frieden is now perhaps the most visible example of the transformation of the field of public health—for better or for worse. Until recently, that arena owed a great debt to the English epidemiologist John Snow, who correctly deduced that the London cholera epidemic of 1854 was caused by contaminated water from the Broad Street pump. Shutting down the pump not only stemmed the tide of the epidemic, but also convinced public officials to undertake construction of sewage and clean-water systems that would effectively end the spread of water-borne epidemics. Encouraged by a series of discoveries of the germ basis of many devastating diseases, researchers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries made other rapid advancements in public health, including the development of vaccines against some of humanity’s deadliest diseases and techniques such as the pasteurization of milk to stem bacterial contaminations. Through these advances, industrialized nations like the United States have completely eliminated such once-deadly diseases as smallpox, diphtheria, and polio, vastly cutting childhood mortality rates and increasing lifespans.
But as the impact of communicable diseases has lessened, public-health medicine—which concerns itself with community-wide solutions to health problems—began to look more intensely at treating and preventing conditions that don’t originate with germs. The focus of researchers and doctors turned especially to conditions thought to underlie cardiovascular disease. But unlike battles against germs, isolating the key cause of such problems has proved elusive, because multiple factors—from genetics to diet to personal habits, like smoking—are all potentially contribute.
Advocates like Frieden have plunged ahead anyway, sometimes proposing simplistic solutions to complex problems, often without much data to back up their claims.
It’s mostly about power.
UPDATE: From the comments:
We need to tell the CDC – “If it ain’t about germs, it ain’t your concern”.
They need to get their nose out of everyone else’s business.
Heh.