Now public esteem for the long-respected Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has plummeted with the arrival of Ebola on American shores. A new CBS News poll found that only 37 percent of Americans thought the centers were doing a good job, down from 60 percent last year. In fact, of nine agencies tested, seven that were judged highly by a majority of Americans last year have now fallen below 50 percent.
I have had my own concerns for decades about CDC. When I was a young appointee in the federal education department under President Reagan, I was assigned to the mournful task of researching suicide among youth. Among other troubling things I learned was that, following the quiet repeal of laws against suicide by all the states, the suicide rate among young Americans tripled.
In the course of my research, I had a briefing book sent to me by CDC. It had the demographic tables for suicide among every group in America--from Ashkenazi Jews (very low) to Zuni Indians (tragically high).One statistic had me scratching my head. I called CDC in Atlanta to ask if numbers for the suicide rate among Black women could possibly be correct. They were near zero! "Well, yes, we've noticed that stat, too," said the CDC staffer on the other end of the phone line, "We call it the BFPF--Black Female Protection Factor." What is that, I asked. "They're very religious," came the reply.
CDC knows this, but they don'tadvertise this? I remembered the Public Service Announcement from TV from the 1950s--"The family that prays together stays together."
Family Research Council's respected MARRI--Marriage and Religion Research Institute--is now the best source to show (with incontrovertible evidence) the importance of marriage and faith in our families' well-being.
Of course, the scales had already fallen from my eyes about CDC. I knew that they had employed Willard Cates there. In 1980, Cates was doing "abortion surveillance" for this federally-funded agency. He advised abortionists to charge fees based on the size of the foot of the unborn child whom they had killed. Even now, thirty-fouryearslater, that reality still send chills down my spine.
Article from The New York Times
