Article by Dylan Scott: “In the initial days of the Trump administration, officials scoured federal websites for any mention of what they deemed “DEI” keywords — terms as generic as “diverse” and “historically” and even “women.” They soon identified reams of some of the country’s most valuable public health data containing some of the targeted words, including language about LGBTQ+ people, and quickly took down much of it — from surveys on obesity and suicide rates to real-time reports on immediate infectious disease threats like bird flu.
The removal elicited a swift response from public health experts who warned that without this data, the country risked being in the dark about important health trends that shape life-and-death public health decisions made in communities across the country.
Some of this data was restored in a matter of days, but much of it was incomplete. In some cases, the raw data sheets were posted again, but the reference documents that would allow most people to decipher them were not. Meanwhile, health data continues to be taken down: The New York Times reported last week that data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on bird flu transmission between humans and cats had been posted and then promptly removed…
It is difficult to capture the sheer breadth and importance of the public health data that has been affected. Here are a few illustrative examples of reports that have either been tampered with or removed completely, as compiled by KFF.
The Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS), which is “one of the most widely used national health surveys and has been ongoing for about 40 years,” per KFF, is an annual survey that contacts 400,000 Americans to ask people about everything from their own perception of their general health to exercise, diet, sexual activity, and alcohol and drug use.
That in turn allows experts to track important health trends, like the fluctuations in teen vaping use. One recent study that relied on BRFSS data warned that a recent ban on flavored e-cigarettes (also known as vapes) may be driving more young people to conventional smoking, five years after an earlier Yale study based on the same survey led to the ban being proposed in the first place. The Supreme Court and the Trump administration are currently revisiting the flavored vape ban, and the Yale study was cited in at least one amicus brief for the case.
This survey has also been of particular use in identifying health disparities among LGBTQ+ people, such as higher rates of uninsurance and reported poor health compared to the general population. Those findings have motivated policymakers at the federal, state and local levels to launch new initiatives aimed specifically at that at-risk population.
As of now, most of the BRFSS data has been restored, but the supplemental materials that make it legible to lay people still has not…(More)”.