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Beware of your government. It's rewriting medical science.
The New York Times
U.S. Revises Sex Information, and a Fight Goes On
Fri Dec 27, 9:02 AM ET Add Top Stories - The New York Times to My Yahoo!
By ADAM CLYMER The New York Times
U.S. Revises Sex Information, and a Fight Goes On
Fri Dec 27, 9:02 AM ET Add Top Stories - The New York Times to My Yahoo!
By ADAM CLYMER The New York Times
WASHINGTON, Dec. 26 The National Cancer Institute, which used to say on its Web site that the best studies showed "no association between abortion and breast cancer," now says the evidence is inconclusive.
Critics say those changes illustrate how the Bush administration can satisfy conservative constituents with relatively little exposure to the kind of attack that a legislative proposal or a White House statement would invite.
Bill Pierce, spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services scoffed at the idea that there was anything political about the changes. "We simply looked at them, and they put them up," he said of the agencies involved.
The new statements were posted in the last month, after news reports that the government had removed their predecessors from the Web. Those reports quoted administration officials as saying the earlier material had been removed so that it could be rewritten with newer scientific information. The latest statements are the revisions.
Fourteen House Democrats have written to Tommy G. Thompson, secretary of health and human services, charging that the new versions "distort and suppress scientific information for ideological purposes."
Gloria Feldt, president of the Planned Parenthood, said the new statement on abortion and breast cancer "simply doesn't track the best available science." "Scientific and medical misinformation jeopardizes peoples' lives," Ms. Feldt said, adding that any suggestion of a connection between abortion and cancer was "bogus."
The earlier statement noted that many studies had reached varying conclusions about a relation between abortion and breast cancer, but said "recent large studies" showed no connection. In particular, it cited a study of 1.5 million Danish women that was published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 1997. That study, the cancer institute said, found that "induced abortions have no overall effect on the risk of breast cancer."
The Danish research, praised by the American Cancer Society as "the largest, and probably the most reliable, study of this topic," is not mentioned in the government's recent posting.
The letter to Secretary Thompson from House Democrats said that by alteration and deletion, the disease control agency "is now censoring the scientific information it makes available to the public." The breast cancer document amounted to nothing more than "the political creation of scientific uncertainty." "Information that used to be based on science," the lawmakers said, "is being systematically removed from the public when it conflicts with the administration's political agenda."
Happy New Year. Dr. Rehert
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