Hello dear friends and colleagues -
Thank you very much for sharing your concerns about the outdated and
incorrect information on flu and bf found on the Influenza site at CDC's
website. Before I say anything else, I do hope that those of you who
know me and/or have read anything I have ever posted on LN would
immediately see it to be obvious and unequivocal that I had absolutely
nothing to do with that misinformation. I appreciate those of you who
immediately understood that point in writing to me. I wish to also
thank those of you who chose to write to me as polite adults. I do need
to say, however, that I am surprised and somewhat shocked at the tone of
some letters to me, particularly those written by people with whom I
have corresponded extensively in the past.
That said, I am glad to have received emails specific to this issue. We
(the bf team) have been working on finding a way to help the National
Center for Infectious Diseases (an entirely separate Center from mine,
the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion,
both parts of the CenterS for Disease Control) to replace this
information with evidence-based information. As you may imagine, those
folks are a little busy right now.
The way CDC is set up, historically each Center has written their own
material on any number of issues, and sought expert input when they knew
where to find it. Because of that, there remains unfortunately a great
deal of well-intentioned yet woefully inaccurate bf information across
various sites within the CDC website. Until recently there was no clear
cut resource within CDC for accurate bf information. One of the big
changes in recent years has been the expansion of the role of the bf
team, headed by Dr. Laurence Grummer-Strawn, who is a well-known
researcher in bf, and including an MD bf epidemiologist as well as
myself, an MPH/IBCLC with a background in Maternal Child Nutrition
Epidemiology. Some of the evidence of this expansion is the inclusion
of bf data collection on the National Immunization Survey, which I
posted here in August, as well as the fact that we award 300k in grants
to evaluate bf interventions annually in an effort to increase the canon
of evidence-based literature on breastfeeding interventions. There's a
lot more going on as well, but the fact remains that we, the bf team,
are a team of usually 4 but currently 3 people working in a system of
9000+ people within CDC alone, not to mention the myriad other federal
agencies whose work touches on bf both within the US Department of
Health and Human Services and elsewhere. The fact of government work is
its not the fastest in the world.
Because of the current, and frankly more pressing issues the Influenza
folks are facing right now, I am working on at least deleting the
misinformation for now, and then working with them in the near future to
replace it with accurate information. I will keep you all updated as
this progresses, and assure you that not one email I have received yet
was nearly as incensed with the misinformation presented as I was when I
first found it some months ago.
As to the concern emailed to me by someone that I am affiliated with an
artificial baby milk manufacturer...I can't even respond to that in a
public forum such as this.
Thank you again,
Katherine Shealy
Katherine Shealy, MPH, IBCLC, RLC
Public Health Breastfeeding Specialist
Maternal and Child Nutrition Branch
Division of Nutrition and Physical Activity
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
http://www.cdc.gov/breastfeeding
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