NEW YORK (AP) -
Progress in the U.S. against obesity, food poisoning, and infections spread
in hospitals has been uneven and disappointing, despite dedicated efforts to
fight these health threats by the nation’s top public health agency.
The Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention issued a frank self-assessment Monday of its
campaign to focus on certain health problems, an effort it called “winnable
battles.” While there have been clear successes in areas like smoking and
teen pregnancy, other areas have seen little change or even gotten worse.
Particularly
disappointing is the battle against childhood obesity, said Dr. Tom Frieden,
the CDC’s director.
“The data speak for
themselves,” Frieden said of the obesity statistics. “If you look for the
goal we set for ourselves, and look at what happened, we didn’t achieve it.”
Frieden set a list
of priorities he called “winnable battles” shortly after he was named to
lead the CDC in 2009. The list included smoking, AIDS, obesity and
nutrition, teen pregnancy, auto injuries and health care infections. It
later grew to include food poisoning.
The most clear-cut
progress was in cigarette smoking and teen pregnancy. Last year, national
goals were met for reducing adult smoking by more than 17 percent, and youth
smoking by 12 percent. The goal of cutting the teen birth rate by 20 percent
was also met.
Critics argued that
those were relatively easy goals - smoking and teen pregnancy rates were
already trending down before Frieden arrived. But Frieden argued that the
goals his agency set were ambitious and never assured.
Another goal once
considered within easy reach was the reduction of car crash deaths by 31
percent by 2015. Earlier in this decade those deaths were plummeting and the
goal seemed well within reach. But crash deaths only fell 21 percent because
of a recent uptick, which many attribute to distracted driving.
The report card
also found:
-Disappointing
results in meeting two food safety goals. Rates of illness from harmful E.
coli bacteria dropped, but didn’t reach the goal of a 29 percent reduction
goal. And illness rates from salmonella increased.
-Mixed progress on
cutting down infections spread in hospitals and medical clinics. Three kinds
of infections declined, but not to target levels. And rates for certain
urinary tract infections didn’t fall at all.
-Inability reduce
the number of new HIV cases by 25 percent. The number of new cases fell by
18 percent.
-Failure to reduce
obesity rates for toddlers and older children. Instead, the rate grew
slightly, to more than 17 percent.
Despite the mixed
grades in the CDC’s report card on itself, some experts applauded CDC
efforts, saying the agency had only limited abilities to prevent illness or
stop people from doing things that hurt their own health.
“I think, to CDC’s
credit, they picked a broad range of public health challenges and they set
the bar high enough that they could not automatically declare success at the
end of an administration,” said Jeff Levi, a George Washington University
professor of health management and policy.
The Atlanta-based
CDC has an annual budget of more than $13 billion and a staff of more than
15,000. Much of its funding is distributed to state and local health
departments, and many of them follow the CDC’s agenda-setting lead.