Philip Alcabes discusses myths of health, disease and risk.

The Preacher at CDC

Just weeks into his tenure as CDC Director, Dr. Thomas Frieden is already preaching moral improvement to the American public.

Yesterday, according to an Associate Press report, Frieden sermonized that “obesity and … diabetes are the only major health problems that are getting worse in this country, and they’re getting worse rapidly.”  Now, Dr. Frieden heads the agency that collects data on illness and calculates disease rates; presumably, he knows that many conditions are either increasing now or have risen to high levels from which they have not retreated — MRSA, Lyme disease, injuries in certain occupations, and foodborne illness, to name just a few.

But as Dr. Frieden’s campaigns in New York City against trans fats, unprotected sex, and TB sufferers who didn’t take their meds  revealed, when there is a moral battle to be fought the facts just get in the way.

The impetus for yesterday’s obesity sermon was a study by investigators at RTI who had determined that “obesity-related diseases” account for over 9 percent of U.S. healthcare costs.  Most people who suffer from most of the so-called obesity related conditions are not actually obese.  Even diabetes, the one most commonly associated with obesity in the popular mind (and, apparently, Dr. Frieden’s) occurs more often among people who are not and have never been obese than it does among those who are obese.  So the study was really showing that obesity accounts for much less than 9 percent of healthcare costs.

But that wasn’t the only problem.  While the RTI study found that obese people spend 40 percent more than comparison “normal” people on health, most of the increase in spending was related to pharmaceuticals.  So one might ask if it was obesity that was increasing expenditures, or the price of certain drugs.

Furthermore, there’s no way to know whether being fat was causing the obesity group in this study to be sick in ways that cost more money, or if they were fat because they were unwell in the first place.

In fact, the study wasn’t designed to test whether becoming obese led to an increase in medical expenditure — which might have shed some light on the question of whether obesity causes higher costs.  Many people in the study had no  expenditures at all for certain types of healthcare costs.  But the researchers weren’t interested in finding out whether obesity sometimes costs nothing at all, so they used an adjustment technique to allow them to relate obesity to predicted expenditures.

Finally, the estimate of percentage of total healthcare costs attributed to obesity-related expenditure was based on the assumption that obese people who return to “normal” weight suffer no consequences of their weight loss — an assumption that is well known to be false.

So it’s a falsehood to state on the basis of the RTI findings that obesity is accounting for a tenth of American healthcare costs — although AP, Reuters, and other media outlets so claimed in covering the Frieden sermon.

In fact, a lucid assessment of the findings would ask why, if obesity is supposedly up 37% among Americans and if two-thirds of Americans are now overweight or obese, obesity would account for only 9% of costs?  Surely if obesity is so bad, increasing its prevalence by more than a third would be swamping the healthcare industry with fat people.

But the whole appeal of a sermon is that it isn’t based on fact or lucid assessment of the present reality. It’s based on suppositions about the future with a steadfast moral foundation.  Frieden has the supposition and he has the moralism.  His religion is that it’s up to the “community” to perfect itself.

As Shirley Wang at WSJ Health Blog reports,  Dr. Frieden believes that  increasing availability and decreasing price of healthy foods, while decreasing availability and increasing  price of unhealthy ones, “is likely to be effective.” He claims that the decision to adopt such a strategy “is a political one.”

But of course it isn’t political in its essence; it’s moral.  When the community is told to perfect itself it rises to the occasion by looking to the usual moral suspects:  women, especially pregnant women or mothers; the uneducated; the poor.  Last fall, Frank Furedi discussed the moral underpinnings of British authorities’ removal of fat children from their parents’ homes.  And we can hope he’ll have something to say about what’s happening in the U.S., where the community policing can be even worse:  a few days ago, a South Carolina mother was arrested and charged with neglect for having a son who weighs over 500 pounds.  Other states have contemplated other methods of dealing with parents who violate the community standards of parenting.  Not by hitting their kids, starving them, or forcing them to work — but by allowing them to get fat.

Obesity is offensive, it seems, in just the way that sexual license and intemperance with alcohol have been found offensive by some.  And just as the problem with sex and drinking has been found in the environment — in “peer pressure,” the “latchkey phenomenon,” TV advertising, Hollywood, and the decline in “family values” — so it is with obesity.  “We did not get to this situation … because of any change in our genetics or any change in our food preferences,” Frieden adumbrated.  “We got to this stage of the epidemic because of a change in our environment and only a change in our environment again will allow us to get back to a healthier place,”

It isn’t obvious what to do when appetites produce offense — so it’s handy to claim that the environment is at fault and then to hand the problem to public health.  Because for certain health officials, it’s always clear what to do:  Take the moral high path, clean up the offending elements, urge the community to police itself better.  If more parents are arrested… well, perfection has its price.

By Philip Alcabes | July 28th, 2009 | Categories: Behavior, Disease, Health Professions, Myths, News, Uncategorized, epidemics, obesity, public health | Tags: , , , , , , , | 1 comment

New Fronts in the War Against the Fat

We thought that American hysteria over obesity was nonpareil, but British anti-fat warriors seem to be giving the American crusaders a run for their money.

Back in April, a fast-food establishment in Leytonstone, in the northeastern part of London, was shut down as a public-health threat.  As Patrick Hayes explains at Spiked, a 2009 initiative of the local council, called the Sustainable Community Strategy, outlaws the establishment of new carry-outs within 400 meters of a school.

Supporting the rhetoric, Professor Kathy Pritchard-Jones, president of the European Society for Paediatric Oncology, stated in February that “If we don’t … tackl[e] how much exercise our young people take and how concerned they are about what they eat and their weight, we are going to have another explosion of cancers.”

Last week, the U.K.’s Environment Secretary, Hillary Benn, invoked the fight against obesity as rationale for increasing access to open spaces, asserting that “green spaces are good for us” – a pitch which moved Spike’s sharp-eyed Rob Lyons to note that “You can’t even go for a stroll these days without it being turned into a health initiative,” and to anticipate that “chubby people [will be] quick-marched around a south London park for 30 minutes on a regular basis to help them lose excess pounds.”

There are so many pieces to the fanfare over the “obesity threat” that it’s impossible to assign one cause for the commotion. For a long time, Junkfood Science has investigated the sociology of the “science” of obesity in detail, and has exploded many of the central myths of the anti-obesity movement – most importantly the apocrypha about fatness and mortality.

And Paul Campos’s brilliant book The Obesity Myth (Gotham, 2004) explains how a constellation of wealthy industries together support the lose-weight-now rhetoric.

Elizabeth Kolbert’s assessment of some new books on the topic in this week’s New Yorker embraces the tired rhetoric, assuming that fat is bad and asking why people eat so much.  To her credit, Kolbert takes the plunge into examining the new field of fat studies.  But she ends up disparaging fat studies for “effectively all[ying] itself with McDonald’s and the rest of the processed-food industry, while opposing the sorts of groups that advocate better school-lunch programs and more public parks.” Apparently, asking that fatness be examined in the context of both social structures and individual liberties strays too far from the central dogma of the anti-obesity crusade.  To which (pace Hillary Benn) public parks are balm and tasty fries are anathema.

But an often-neglected aspect of the anti-obesity panic is the overtone of class and the undertone of race. In Leytonstone, for instance, it turns out that the community has been troubled by the profusion of cheap eating establishments, especially in regard to the “anti-social behaviour” that it supposedly brings.

Yet, as Hayes notes at Spiked, it was a Jamaican establishment that was singled out for closure – while more echt-English outlets, like fish-and-chips shops, have been ignored.  The decision that behavior is anti-social being always in the eyes of the beholder – or the skin color of the beheld.

In most of the developed world, fatness is more common among the poor.  In the U.S., it is far more common among African Americans.  Obesity is a marker for being out of power.  To assert that you are against obesity is to state that you intend to identify with those who have power, and mean to keep it.  You can wag your finger at the misdemeanants who eat fast food and fail to exercise — without having to come out and say that what is really troubling you is that your people are starting to look like those people – like the poor, like the dark-complected … like the fat.

No wonder the anti-obesity rhetoric has heated up in Britain, and is catching on in Europe.  It’s a winning way to wage the war against the poor and unentitled, without having to seem arrogant or racist.

By Philip Alcabes | July 26th, 2009 | Categories: Behavior, Disease, Myths, Narratives, obesity, public health | Tags: , , , , | Comments Off

Public Health and Purity

A week ago, we rode by bus nearly the full length of the old land of Galicia, from L’viv in Ukraine to Kraków, Poland.  Our one long stop was at Belzec, where a moving memorial, the creation of historians and artists, speaks to a double disaster:  the murder of nearly half a million people, predominantly Jews, who were gassed there in 1942 and ‘43; and the so-called purification of the region by virtually erasing part (the Jewish part) of a historically complex culture.

The visit spoke to a modern concern, too:  the connections between purity and public health.

The commandant at Belzec, Christian Wirth, had been one of the directors of the Nazi euthansia program, nicknamed T4.  Between 1939 and 1941, T4 killed over 70,000 Germans — mostly full-blooded “Aryans” — who had psychiatric or developmental problems, or congenital conditions, and who were therefore lebensunwerten, unworthy of life.

The T4 program, in its turn, grew out of the Nazi doctrine of racial hygiene — an effort to improve the public’s health by control of breeding.  Racial hygiene was based on eugenics, and led to public health endeavors such as screening for congenital conditions, mandatory sterilization of sexual transgressors and disease carriers, and selective breeding.  The Nazi public health program was much applauded by American public health experts, at least in its first few years.

Once the decision was made to eliminate Jews from Nazi-occupied regions, the experience that Wirth and colleagues acquired through killing the lebensunwerten in T4 was invaluable.  Going from exterminating tens of thousands of mentally ill or developmentally disabled people to eradicating a few million Jews, Gypsies, and other polluters of Aryan health was just a matter of making the process more efficient.

It’s striking how thin the line is between laudable public health goals, like limiting congenital disease through screening, and implementing the concept of race purity.

By Philip Alcabes | July 26th, 2009 | Categories: Disease, Myths, Uncategorized, public health | Tags: , , , | Comments Off

Risk, Opportunity, and Care

We’re off this evening to Ukraine and Poland, for a trip involving family heritage and some literary-historical exploration (as well as visiting with friends).

The CDC’s travelers’ health website recommends vaccination against typhoid (as well as hepatitis A and B, and routine childhood immunizations) for travelers visiting small towns and villages in Ukraine.  Since we expect to be doing exactly that, we opted to be immunized.

Picking up the oral typhoid vaccine at a pharmacy in the Bronx made us reflect on inequities in health, and inequalities of opportunity.  How odd, to stand in an air-conditioned pharmacy on a busy street in New York City and prepare to fortify oneself against a disease that, here, we consider of historical interest.  Typhoid makes us think of the sad episode of Mary Mallon, the infamous typhoid carrier, and the struggles of Almroth Wright to develop a vaccine that would limit the terrible toll that typhoid took on British troops in the Boer War.  All a very long time ago.

That typhoid is still a public health problem in much of the world attests to real differences in opportunity.  Clean drinking water, and the sanitary systems that allow water to stay clean, being aspects of opportunity.

The American conversation about health uses the grammar of risk.  Our health professionals talk about the possibility that illness will ensue if people persist in some behavior (smoking, inhaling others’ cigarette smoke, using certain pharmaceuticals, driving while intoxicated, etc.), if authorities fail to inform, if vaccine isn’t produced on time.  But a sense of scale is lost.

Flu preoccupies the risk conversation right now, for obvious reasons having to do with the current outbreak of H1N1 influenza.  The risk conversation sometimes appeals to the terrible pandemic of 1918, the worst single-strike disease outbreak of all time.  But it doesn’t often recall that, in the United States, the 1918 flu spared over 99% of the population.

The talk of risk, the sometimes-lurid conversation about what might happen, almost always occupies itself with the tiny tail of the broad distribution of health – the minuscule proportion of the population that, even in a frightening outbreak, actually dies from it.

What’s left out is the real situation that confronts most people, most of the time.  Not the sudden outbreak, but the persistent struggle to stave off more mundane problems that rarely appear in the media.

Junkfood Science this week reminds us to keep the care in health care.  Care seems relevant here.  The risk conversation gives us clues – sometimes valuable ones – about how to diminish somewhat the number of people who are sickened or killed by a threat, like flu.  But to really get at people’s health – to offer a more thoroughgoing and humanistic form of care – will mean moving past the narrow conversation about risk, and asking about opportunity.

It isn’t risk that keeps most people from achieving capabilities — from escaping poverty, living comfortably, or being free of disability.  It’s more usually bad water, bad food, or just bad government.  A broader and more effective health conversation would start with the conditions of living, and not be preoccupied with the risks of illness alone.

By Philip Alcabes | July 9th, 2009 | Categories: Behavior, Disease, Health Professions, Outbreaks, Risk, epidemics, public health | Tags: , , , , , | Comments Off

How to Cover a Health Crisis – or Make One

A post by revere at Effect Measure reminded us that the pandemic preparedness initiative had an intrinsic ineptitude to it.  “CDC had been training state labs to make the differentiation between the two seasonal flu subtypes, H1N1 and H3N2, and bird flu, H5N1, so the capability to do seasonal subtyping already existed outside of CDC. But neither the reagents nor the proficiency for the new swine virus did.”

In other words, everyone had their guard up – but not for the right thing.

How was the public health apparatus so beguiled by the possibility of disaster that, when a relatively mild outbreak of flu took shape, the entire public health industry responded as if disaster were truly at hand?

To investigate, we tracked mentions of flu in news articles (letters and op-ed pieces were not included) published in the NY Times.  The pattern turned out to be revealing about how a pandemic is made.

From 1981 through 1996, inclusive, there were between 5 and 16 stories on flu each year – with the exception of 21 articles in 1986 (when a very mild flu season was predicted and a rather severe flu season surprised people).  On average, the Times ran 8.7 stories per year in that period.

Flu fever at the Times spiked in 1997, when the first cases of avian flu were announced and there was interest in how the W.H.O. would handle it.  Through 1999, there were 20-25 stories per year, an average of 22 – about two articles per month.

But in 2003, which was both the year of SARS and the peak of the bioterrorism-preparedness psychosis, coverage exploded:  the Times ran 50 stories on flu.

In 2004, the failure of any bioterrorists to take the field forced the Bush administration to claim that it wasn’t bioterrorism it had been worried about, it was pandemic flu.  As that administration was always a fountain of unassailable truth, it will be recalled, Secretary Tommy Thompson’s August ’04 Pandemic Preparedness plan convinced many people that flu is our real security problem.  The Times complied, running 130 articles on flu in 2004, with a slight fall-off thereafter.

If you were a dedicated Times reader, you had encountered an article on flu roughly every six weeks back in the early ‘90s.  But by 2006 you read about flu twice a week, on average.  And that was often in the context of pandemic preparedness.

The Washington Post’s pattern was similar (differences in the Post’s search engine and archive arrangement required a slightly different analysis), but its coverage was even more flu-prone.  A dedicated Post reader saw five articles on flu in the A section each week, by 2006.

Does this mean that media created a flu crisis singlehandedly?  Of course not – media make stories, or deliver other people’s, but they alone can’t make crises.  Much of the coverage followed leads provided by scientists – who, let’s face it, have to make sure the grant money keeps flowing in their particular direction (that was the origin of the 1976 fiasco over swine flu vaccine).  And much of the crisis was driven by business, especially the growing market for flu remedies.

But the media analysis sheds some light on why the preparedness rhetoric was so powerful in shaping American public health around security – and therefore juicing up the current flu outbreak into a global crisis.

H1N1 flu is a health problem, sure.  As DemFromCT has been explaining, it’s a problem that can and should be dealt with through standard public health channels, and with a circumspect eye on what we know and what we don’t.

But if it weren’t for weak government, overeager scientists, and compliant media infusing flu with a global-crisis flavor, would it register as such a grand problem?  We feel sad about the 332 swine flu deaths, but we also recognize that that total equals just a few hours worth of mortality from TB or malaria in the poor parts of the world.

As for media, the number of flu deaths registered in the U.S. is almost exactly equal to the mortality on American highways on any given Saturday.  (At Effect Measure today, revere notices the similarity between seasonal flu mortality and vehicle-related mortality.  Alas, revere misses the larger point:  this similarity demonstrates that flu can be called a “crisis” when it causes far lower mortality than usual, whereas highway accidents are never called a crisis.)

Any preventable death is lamentable, of course.  But you don’t read much about an epidemic of vehicle crashes in the papers.

n.b.  This is a slightly amended version of the original post, which because of faulty hyperlinking, improperly implied ineptitude where there wasn’t any.

By Philip Alcabes | July 4th, 2009 | Categories: Disease, Health Professions, Narratives, News, Outbreaks, epidemics, public health | Tags: , , , , , | 2 comments