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The widely
publicized US government study reporting obesity was set to be the leading preventable
cause of death for Americans appears to have contained serious errors that inflated the
numbers. The study was cited prominently in the March, 2004 kickoff of a government
anti-obesity campaign. |
| Errors are now
conceded by the study's authors who included scientists at the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention and the center's director, Dr. Julie Gerberding, in a letter published in
Journal of the American Medical Association 10 months after the original study was
published. |
| The correction
lowered the estimated annual obesity death toll from 400,000 to 365,000. The CDC blamed
computational errors for the mistake. Critics disagreed, saying that the actual obesity
death toll could be much lower because of methodological errors used in calculating the
risks. Professor of medicine Stanton Glantz at U.C. San Francisco said, "They're
still stonewalling and still denying the fundamental problem." |
| The original report
was labeled shoddy by some scientists at the CDC and other researchers before being
published. Those original critics continue to be unsatisfied. They claim the study used
methodologies that exaggerate obesity's potential death toll beyond its recent
corrections. |
| In June, 2003, Los
Angeles Representative Henry Waxman requested a Government Accountability Office
investigation into the matter. He recently said, "CDC needs to disclose how a flawed
paper was cleared within the agency and what measures are in place to prevent similar
problems in the future." |
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