Philip Alcabes discusses myths of health, disease and risk.

The Myth of Normal Weight

Don’t miss Paul Campos’s commentary on overweight and obesity in today’s NYT.  Responding to the latest report by Katherine Flegal of CDC and coworkers, Campos points out that

If the government were to redefine normal weight as one that doesn’t increase the risk of death, then about 130 million of the 165 million American adults currently categorized as overweight and obese would be re-categorized as normal weight instead.

The report by Flegal et al., published this week in JAMA, is a meta-analysis of 97 studies on body-mass index (BMI) and mortality.  This new analysis found that mortality risks for the “overweight” (BMI 25-29.9) was 6% lower than that for “normal” BMI (18.5-24.9) individuals.  And those in the “grade 1 obesity” category, with BMIs from 30 to 34.9, were at no higher risk of dying than those in the so-called normal range.   Only those with BMIs of 35 and above were at elevated risk of dying, and then only by 29%.

In other words, people who are overweight or obese generally live longer than those who are in the normal range.  Only extreme obesity is associated with an increased probability of early death.

Flegal and colleagues already demonstrated most of these findings using administrative data, in an article appearing in JAMA in 2005.  There, they reported no excess mortality among people labeled “overweight” by BMI standards, and that about three-quarters of excess mortality among the “obese” was accounted for by those with BMIs above 35.

What’s notable about this week’s publication is that it has attracted the attention of some heavy hitters in the media.  Pam Belluck covered the JAMA report for the NYT.  Although her article seems more interested in propping up the myths about the dangers of fat than in conveying the main points of the new analysis, Belluck does acknowledge that some health professionals would like to see the definition of normal revised.

Dan Childs’s story for ABC News gives a clear picture of the findings, and allows the obesity warriors, like David Katz of Yale and Mitchell Roslin at Lenox Hill, to embarrass themselves — waving the “fat is bad” banner under which they do battle.  MedPage Today gives the story straight up.   In NPR’s story, another warrior, Walter Willett of Harvard, unabashedly promoting his own persistently fuzzy thinking, calls the Flegal article “rubbish” — but the reporter, Allison Aubrey, is too sharp to buy it from someone so deeply invested.  She ends by suitably questioning the connections of BMI to risk.

Campos’s op-ed piece does the favor of translating the Flegal findings into everyday terms (and without the pointless provisos that burden the NYT’s supposed news story):

This means that average-height women — 5 feet 4 inches — who weigh between 108 and 145 pounds have a higher mortality risk than average-height women who weigh between 146 and 203 pounds. For average-height men — 5 feet 10 inches — those who weigh between 129 and 174 pounds have a higher mortality risk than those who weigh between 175 and 243 pounds.

Is the hysteria about overweight and obesity is over?  I’m sure not.  In today’s article, Campos — who was one of the first to explode the fiction of an obesity epidemic, with his 2002 book The Obesity Myth — reminds us of a crucial fact about public health:

Anyone familiar with history will not be surprised to learn that “facts” have been enlisted before to confirm the legitimacy of a cultural obsession and to advance the economic interests of those who profit from that obsession.

There’s too much at stake with the obesity epidemic for our culture’s power brokers to give it up so quickly.  One day, some other aspect of modernity will emerge to inspire dread (and profits).  In the meantime, we might at least hope to see some re-jiggering of the BMI boogeyman.

 

Gun Violence: The Silence of the Officials

A week after the murderous fusillade in Aurora, Colorado, not one public health official has stepped forward to call for gun control.

Attribute the 9 deaths and dozens of injuries in Aurora to the rash act of an unbalanced man if you wish.  But what about the tens of thousands of other deaths caused by firearms in the U.S. each year?

If HIV infection (9,406 deaths in 2011) and painkiller overdose (estimated at 15,000 deaths per year, according to a report  by Trust for America’s Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation) are public health problems worth discussion, why not firearms?  In 2009, the last year for which complete data are available, there were 31,347 deaths by firearm in the US, according to the US National Center for Injury Prevention and Control.

At The Pump Handle, Celeste Monforton — always worth reading — provides the data showing how out-of-scale America’s gun problem is on the global public health scene:  Our gun-violence death rates are an order of magnitude higher than those of other wealthy nations.

At CNN, Daniel Webster calls for America to wake up to the public health problem of guns.  “America’s high rate of gun violence is shameful,” Webster writes.  “When will we change?”

NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg can be a tyrant when it comes to personal habits that he thinks impair the city’s health, but he has been courageously forthright on the need to control firearms.

But, like me, Monforton and Webster are academics.  And Mike Bloomberg is, well, Mike Bloomberg.

Where are the health officials?

Kathleen Sibelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services, has been silent.  She’s been vocal on healthcare fraud, and earlier this week announced a new public-private partnership to keep people with AIDS in care.   But not a word on guns.

Thomas Frieden, CDC director, can’t be accused of shying from the spotlight.  But he has said nothing about guns.

Under these corrupt officials, gun violence has been cleaned from the public health radar screen.

Try finding an entry on firearm violence at the Department of Health and Human Services website.  Or, go to the CDC’s “A-Z Index” (what other letters would bound an index, one wonders? well, anyway…).  There’s no entry for “guns” or “gun violence.”  Nor for “firearms.”  The entry on “violence” leads to a page on injury prevention that includes links to entries on Elder Maltreatment and Intimate Partner Violence — but not a word on guns.

At Salon, Alex Seitz-Wald wonders whether the NRA has suppressed research.  There’s some evidence for this:  Paul Helmke of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence wrote to Secretary Sibelius over a year ago, asking whether it’s true that Frieden’s CDC has agreed to tip off the NRA when researchers who receive CDC monies are going to publish anything on gun violence.

Seitz-Wald might well be perfectly right.  Certainly, the NRA is unseemly, manipulative, and morally vacuous.  But it doesn’t have the power to program anyone’s thoughts.  It doesn’t cause our officials to be spineless in the face of the infestation of American homes and streets — and movie theaters, schools, colleges, and so on — by guns.

No, it can only be that Frieden and Sibelius — and a tremendous host of less prominent health officials — are all silent about  guns because, really, they aren’t concerned about 31,000 deaths and upward of 400,000 injuries from firearms each year.  Or, not as concerned about the carnage as they are about their jobs.

It’s self-evident that our health officials don’t care about the real health of Americans nearly as much as they do about their own continuation as officials.  More important than saving lives or limbs, apparently, is the officials’ capacity to mount the bully pulpit in order to decry other dreadful scourges.  Like big cups of soda, defrauding the insurance companies, or not exercising.

Our public health officials:  put to the test, and found to be feckless at core.

 

Disaster for Health Care Reform: Supreme Court Upholds Affordable Care Act

Chief Justice Roberts is the diabolical genius of free-market jurisprudence.  Reformers have been sucker-punched.  Any possibility of creating an equitable system for delivering medical care has been postponed for at least a generation.

Yet, liberals are rejoicing at yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling, in which Roberts left the three arch-conservatives (Thomas-Scalia-Alito) and Kennedy, to join the usually liberal wing (Brier-Ginsberg-Kagan-Sotomayor) in order to uphold the Affordable Care Act, the health care financing law of 2010.  Paul Krugman says that the “real winners are ordinary Americans — people like you.”

The celebration is misguided.  After yesterday’s ruling, there will be no national health system.  There will be no single-payer nonprofit insurance plan.  For the foreseeable future, diagnosis, treatment, and corporate profit will remain the inseparable triumvirate of medicine.  Hardly party-worthy.

Sure, there are a few things worth cheering about.  As Josh Levs set forth yesterday in a particularly cogent summary of the new law, insurers won’t be able to deny coverage to people with pre-existing conditions (young people immediately, everyone from 2014 on).   Until you’re 26, you will be able to get health insurance from your parents’ insurance policy, especially useful now with unemployment so high among the young.  Some of the “doughnut hole” in Medicare prescription drug reimbursements will be closed.

But Roberts’s brilliance was revealed in his handling of the vexatious issue of the mandate — the requirement that each non-indigent American purchase health insurance coverage or be fined by the Feds.  The fine would begin at $285 per family or 1% of income, whichever is higher, in 2014 but climb to over $2000 or 2.5% by 2016.  Instead of looking at the mandate and accompanying fine for noncompliance as a regulation, Roberts picked up on the fall-back argument adduced by Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, Jr. — he asserted that it’s really a tax.  And, of course, Congress can levy taxes.

At Slate, Tom Scocca explains that Roberts used his majority opinion on this case to undercut Congress’s right to regulate commercial activity.  For Scocca,

the health care law was, ultimately, a pretext. This was a test case for the long-standing—but previously fringe—campaign to rewrite Congress’ regulatory powers under the Commerce Clause… Roberts’ genius was in pushing this health care decision through without attaching it to the coattails of an ugly, narrow partisan victory. Obama wins on policy, this time. And Roberts rewrites Congress’ power to regulate, opening the door for countless future challenges. In the long term, supporters of curtailing the federal government should be glad to have made that trade.

According to CDC’s summary of the latest Congressional Budget Office estimates, about 30 million uninsured Americans will gain coverage under the ACA in the next few years, leaving about 27 million without health insurance at all.  That’s an estimate, because undocumented immigrants are untouched by the ACA.  Ditto prisoners, who supposedly get health care in their institutions but, by all indications, often don’t.

And, the Roberts ruling opens the door to questions about the Federal government’s capacity to get the states to expand Medicaid coverage.  Roberts and four justices say it’s limited.  Four others say it doesn’t exist at all.  As Charles Ornstein explains at ProPublica, that means that some states might simply refuse to expand Medicaid, which would undercut one of the aims of the ACA.

The final score is hardly a victory for “ordinary” Americans.

  • We now have a Congress that may tell Americans to give money directly to private corporations, or pay a penalty to the Federal government.  At least when Congress can claim that paying private corporations is in our best interest.  In other words, now private insurance companies may collect taxes.
  • We will have insurance companies that may continue to profit from Americans’ suffering.
  • We will still have nearly 10% of the population without access even to primary care.
  • We now have questions about whether Congress may impel the states to indemnify the sick poor.  (Hardly cause for optimism, especially at a time when states are seeking ways to lighten budgetary obligations, for instance by reducing pension benefits for public employees.)

And the Roberts ruling accomplishes this victory for corporate power by upholding the law, not striking it down.  That means that Congress won’t re-consider health care financing anytime soon.  Which means that the single-payer system will rest in its grave for the time being.

Yesterday was no cause for celebration.  It was a dark day for health care reform.

 

 

The Health Department at Work

I was pleased to receive a phone call from the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene  and to be selected to participate in a “health survey.”  The questions offered a fascinating insight into the agency’s preoccupations — and what sorts of impropriety obsess its leadership nowadays.

It’s reassuring that the Department wants to be able to estimate how many New Yorkers lack health insurance and, separately, lack a regular health-care provider, and asked questions about those things.  And I was impressed that the survey designers thought to ask whether, the last time I sought help for a medical problem, it took a long time to get an appointment.

And then came some predictable How Are We Doing? questions:  Have I had a flu immunization in the past 12 months? (No, thank you, I’m not convinced that it works…  Okay, I didn’t say that, the survey taker seemed young and too earnest for serious critique, so I just said “No.”)  At least two doses of hepatitis B vaccine at some time in the past?  When did I last have a colonoscopy?

But there was the question about whether I have used oxocodone or hydrocodone (OxyContin or Vicodin) without a prescription, or outside of the prescribed dosage.  The Department has just announced a new campaign to stop people from using pain killers too much.

There was the question about whether I’m exposed to cigarette smoke in my household.

There was a question on whether my household has a disaster plan.  No, we don’t.  We have a couple of flashlights, some water, and a bottle of scotch.  Will that do?  We’re grown-ups, we don’t have pets or little children to look after.  We’ll work something out.

(But I didn’t say that to my earnest interviewer, either.  I have a feeling they don’t find whiskey to be humorous, over there at the health department.  In fact, they had some very specific questions about alcohol consumption, amount and frequency.)

There were questions about how often I exercise vigorously.  How often I exercise moderately.  How often I exercise lightly.  How long I engage in said exercise when I do do it.  Very interested in exercise, our health department.

There was the question as to how many servings of fruit or vegetables I ate yesterday.

And then, onward to mayor Mike Bloomberg’s white whale:  sugar-sweetened beverages!  Mayor Mike is going to ban serving soda or other sweet beverages in large sizes — and he’s not asking for a new law (which might not pass), just a go-ahead from the city’s eleven-person Board of Health, all appointed by the mayor, chaired by the city’s cheerleader for “healthy lifestyles,” health commissioner Thomas Farley.   A restaurant trade association, the Center for Consumer Freedom, responded to news of the mayor’s intention with an amusing ad in today’s NYT, portraying Bloomberg as The Nanny.

The survey questions:  How often do I drink soda or bottled iced tea?  What about beverages to which I add sugar myself, like tea or coffee?

And, now that we were deep into the zone of health officials’ self-stimulation:  how many (a) women and (b) men had I had sex with in the past year?  Did I use condoms?  And, had I used the Internet to meet a sex partner in the past 12 months?

So much for health.  Now we know what haunts the dreams of the self-righteous mayor and his bluenose health commissioner:

Pain relief.

Fat people.

Vigorous exercise.

Pleasurable foods.

 Sex.

Reading this list, you would have to be forgiven for thinking that these men, Bloomberg and Farley, have been living in a monastery since, say, the 14th century.  In fact, if they were really clergymen instead of officials, they would leave us alone about how we eat and sweat and screw.  At least in between sermons.

But thanks for calling.

 

 

 

Censoring Science

Crof’s H5N1 blog is the place to watch for coverage of this week’s controversy over censorship of scientific findings.  A few words here about the controversy and the rush to censor science.

As Martin Enserink reports at Science Insider:

Two groups of scientists who carried out highly controversial studies with the avian influenza virus H5N1 have reluctantly agreed to strike certain details from manuscripts describing their work after having been asked to do so by a U.S. biosecurity council. The as-yet unpublished papers, which are under review at Nature and Science, will be changed to minimize the risks that they could be misused by would-be bioterrorists.

The “biosecurity council” in question is the U.S. National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity, an arm of the NIH’s Office of Science Policy.   It has recommended censorship of research on genetic alterations of avian (H5N1) flu that might make the virus easily transmissible between humans and pathogenic as well — ingredients for a potentially serious human outbreak.

I attach little public health importance to the experimental work, carried out by Fouchier in the Netherlands and Kawaoka in the U.S.  Flu’s behavior in human populations has been notoriously difficult to predict, even with relatively advanced molecular information about viral strains.  Flu forecasters repeatedly predict bad outbreaks and even (as in 2009) devastating pandemics — which fail to materialize.

Even when it comes to the most studied flu outbreak of all, the 1918 pandemic, opinions still differ on why so many millions of people died.

This week, what concerns me is the biosecurity industry.  It seems more than ever eager to terrify people.   The Fouchier and Kawaoka experiments themselves are interesting but hardly recipes for disaster.   And yet, some voices say the research shouldn’t have been carried out in the first place.  Surprisingly, they include the respected D.A. Henderson, here much mistaken.  He editorializes this week with two coauthors for the online publication Biosecurity and Bioterrorism.

It’s not opposition to science — it’s just the biosecurity “experts” making a living.

The move to suppress publication of research results because scientific findings might tip off some chimerical evildoers is ridiculous.  Fouchier, Kawaoka, and their teams were obviously trying to contribute to the search for ways to make people safer.   That’s what most people want science to do.  Instead of urging caution, the many scientists on the NSABB should be standing up for the wide dissemination of scientific findings — not for suppressing them.  Made-up concerns over “bioterrorism” should not trump public access to scientific research.

And the NSABB scientists shouldn’t be cowed by the self-professed biosecurity “experts” at the Center for Biosecurity.

The sole raison-d’etre of the “biosecurity” business is to keep itself in business — by keeping people terrified.   It does that by continually invoking impossible scenarios that are supposed to (a) frighten the public and (b) cause the public to buy products that we don’t need or give up rights that we do need.

After being scared into thinking the 2009 H1N1 outbreak was going to be a reprise of the 1918 flu calamity and finding that it was exceptionally mild instead, surely the public is not going to be taken in by the biosecurity industry much longer.

It’s anybody’s guess as to whether the new findings about H5N1 are at all meaningful in (human) public health terms.  Which is what happens with science.  That’s why the point of suppressing the findings isn’t to make anyone safer – – it’s just to keep the biosecurity experts in business.