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June 2003
Undermining Science
Sometimes the government's plan to keep people
healthy reminds me of a Barbie doll. It is dangerously thin and
devoid of any trappings of sex. I
am not even sure the word "sex" can
be mentioned by this compassionate government, lest saying it
would unloose on
an innocent public a Santorum nightmare of AIDS, hepatitis-B, teen
pregnancy, adultery, homosexuality, bigamy, poly-gamy, bestiality,
divorce and abortion.
A recent draft of an HHS official guide on what government health
officials can say about prevention contained the letter combination
S-E-X only three times in a 69-page document; once as a synonym
for gender, once in a bold call for sexually active women to get
a Pap smear every three years and once in passing reference to
a federal study that explicitly says teen sex is of public concern.
Other than that, the proposed lesson plan for government health
communicators made zero mention of sex, although 20,000 Americans
die each year from AIDS and 15 million have some kind of sexually
transmitted disease. Unsafe bicycling by children, however, merited
two mentions. Apparently, 275 children's bicycle deaths a year
is a tragedy; 20,000 deaths from AIDS merely a statistic.
The prevention
campaign launched by HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson is a worthy
initiative, and, fortunately, the
first draft of the “talking
points” guide was scrapped once actual scientists started
pointing out the obvious. But the fact that such a paper got drafted
in the first place, ignoring the evidence about one vital area
of individual and public health, should make us wary about the
administration's larger agenda. In this case the larger goal seems
to be the government's insistence that abstinence as a way of combating
sexually transmitted disease is the best and only way.
The problem here is larger than just the political and sexual
sensitivities of the Bush administration; it is a wholesale and
dangerous undermining of science. In fact, just as the HHS draft
was circulating, a review of 44 studies involving 35,000 teenagers
over a 16-year period in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent
Medicine found that that intensive education and counseling programs
substantially reduced adolescents' risky sexual behavior.
Government-sponsored
research in the past 50 years has produced a body of evidence
on how diseases develop and spread — and
how they disappear when prevented and treated properly. Support
for those discoveries came directly from taxpayers, and we ought
to make full use of the knowledge we have paid for.
There is not a single mention of AIDS in this draft about domestic
preventive health strategies, even as the administration is about
to launch a $15 billion commitment to thwart AIDS in Africa and
the Caribbean.
Even those suspicious of big government generally accept health
promotion as a proper federal responsibility, but ignoring sex
devalues and discredits an otherwise well-designed disease-prevention
campaign. And wastes our money.
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