Health groups sound alarm on missing CDC, FDA data
Feb. 8 (UPI) -- Many prominent healthcare organizations are urging the Trump administration officials to restore important data sets on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Food and Drug Administration websites.
More than 1,000 pages of national, regional and state health data was removed from the CDC and FDA websites on Jan. 31 as part of a federal government data purge.
Many pages have been restored, but many remain inaccessible, which some healthcare organizations say threatens the quality of healthcare delivery across the nation, ABC News reported.
"Many widely used government data sets have been removed or removed and later restored with redacted data," the nonprofit American Cancer Society said Thursday in a news release.
"There have also been reports that scientific papers from federal authors have been withdrawn from submission to research journal spending administration review."
Dr. Wayne A.I. Frederick, the American Cancer Society interim chief Executive officer, asked the Trump administration to "restore access to comprehensive data, refrain from changes that would lead to incomplete future data collection and commit to ensure evidence-based science and proceed without additional bureaucracy or red tape.
"Access to comprehensive, consistent and ongoing data is imperative to our ability to make progress to end cancer as we know it for everyone," Frederick said.
The Association of Health Care Journalists said data regarding HIV was among information temporarily made inaccessible by the data purge.
Web pages regarding estimated HIV incidence and prevalence; HIV diagnoses, deaths and prevalence; HIV data guidelines and resources and HIV surveillance reports have been restored after initially being inaccessible, the AHCJ reported on Wednesday.
Most troubling, according to the AHCJ, was the sudden halt in publishing the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report that was not available for two weeks after being published weekly since July 1, 1960.
At least one member of Congress called on the Trump administration to resume publishing the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
"Doctors, health care providers and the public all benefit from the release of critical and timely health information. Without it,we will see preventable suffering and death," said Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., in a statement released on Wednesday.
"The Trump Administration must immediately resume the timely, objective and scientific publication of the CDC's MMWR reports without any political meddling by releasing the next MMWR issue tomorrow," Durbin said.
The weekly report was published Thursday and mostly focuses on the effects of the recent wildfires in the greater Los Angeles area.
Thursday's weekly report follows the Jan. 16 weekly report.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment regarding the data purge from the CDC and FDA websites or the temporary halt in publishing the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
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