Guess What You Won't Be Hearing About? Political Pressure Influences Workshop Line Up at CDC Conference on STDs

Saturday May 6, 2006

Amanda Schaffer at Slate exposes yet another attempt by members of the current administration to shove science out of the way of political (read: religious) ideology. And the attempt was completely successful.

A panel at the upcoming National STD Prevention Conference which went through all the regular channels of peer review and approval has been changed at the last minute, apparently as a result of political pressure put on the CDC.

A symposium titled "Are Abstinence-Only-Until-Marriage Programs a Threat to Public Health?" which was proposed by Bruce Trigg of the New Mexico Department of Public Health and included John Santelli from Columbia University's School of Public Health and William Smith from the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States, was meant to offer a science based critique (one that is now well established) of the abstinence-only education programs funded by the Bush administration.

But the symposium has changed, with a new title, "Public Health Strategies of Abstinence Programs for Youth," and without Trigg as moderator and without William Smith at all. In their place are two advocates of abstinence-only education.

According to the Slate piece, senior scientists from the conference have said that Republican Representative Mark Souder reviewed the conference and decided that a more "balanced" approach was needed. The result was that scientists caved and a completely reasonable panel is gone.

What's infuriating about this is not the idea that there should be balanced views presented at an important conference on STDs, of course there should. But rather the idea that a politician is setting the agenda for the major STD conference in the U.S. The Slate piece concludes:

"The most vexing thing about this episode is not that STD researchers will apparently have to duke it out with two pro-abstinence ideologues. It's that the event's peer-review process has been undermined. "This conference has always been run as a scientific meeting," said Jonathan Zenilman, chief of infectious diseases at Johns Hopkins and president of the American Sexually Transmitted Diseases Association, one of the groups organizing the conference along with the CDC.
Politicians now appear to be setting different standards. "My sense is that the leadership in Washington just thinks this is business as usual and doesn't even realize that these kinds of things didn't happen before," Santelli said. These things didn't happen. And they shouldn't start to."

Previously - Medical Students to Hear about Abstinence, Whether They Like it or Not.; New Abstinence Only Guidelines Reach New Low; US Policy on HIV Prevention is Difficult to Carry Out, and Impossible to Measure