Health Agency Wastes Cash on Consultants, Screens, Report Finds
By John Lauerman
Bloomberg
June 12, 2007
June 12 (Bloomberg) -- The top public health agency spent millions of dollars on a Hollywood consultant, a lavish visitors center, and a 70-foot-by-25 foot ``wall of plasma televisions,'' a senator's report said.
Using some money intended to fight bioterrorism, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention paid out more than $1.7 million since 2001 to get producers to include public health messages in television shows and movies, according to the report, issued today by Tom Coburn, an Oklahoma Republican. One consultant is a former CDC employee, the report said.
The Atlanta-based agency last week asked for more money and an airplane to help with the fight against tuberculosis after the travels of an infected man called attention to gaps in controlling the disease. Coburn, a doctor who sits on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said the CDC has mismanaged the $9.2 billion budget it already has, while infections such as with the AIDS virus keep growing.
``I have consulted CDC's experts and materials to help me successfully treat my patients, and I value the good work it is capable of doing,'' he said in a statement. ``Unfortunately in many areas, CDC is just one among many federal agencies that I believe is not properly living up to its own mission.''
CDC has briefed Coburn's staff extensively on its programs and spending, said Tom Skinner, an agency spokesman. The effort to get public health messages written into television programs, run by the former agency employee turned Hollywood consultant, has been worthwhile, he said.
``We have a number of examples of how that project has worked to incorporate messages about public health into story lines that have an impact,'' he said. ``It has proven very effective in reaching people.''
Televisions
CDC also spent $106 million on a global communications center, named for Senator Thomas Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, that includes a conference center, information center, and $20- million television studio. The building houses a ``lavish new visitor center'' with the 70-foot-by-25 foot expanse of televisions to tell the story of the agency's battles against disease, the report said.
``It is unclear why an agency that is tasked with controlling and preventing diseases is spending millions of dollars budgeted for those fights on a wall of plasma televisions,'' it said.
The visitor center and its television screens are part of a larger communications center that CDC built to prepare for health disasters, such as a pandemic of deadly influenza or a bioterrorist attack, Skinner said.
Tuberculosis
CDC has been under increased scrutiny since revealing that Andrew Speaker, the son-in-law of a CDC researcher, left and returned to the last month with drug-resistant tuberculosis, a contagious lung disease. In Washington hearings last week, CDC director Julie Gerberding called for more funds for better TB testing and a plane to transport infectious patients.
The report cited the agency for spending $10 million to furnish its emergency operations center, $200,000 on a fitness center, and considering opening an office in Hawaii at the suggestion of a former employee who works at the University of Hawaii. The agency has also been unable to show whether a $335 million advertising campaign has helped reduce obesity in children as intended, according to the report.
At the same time, the agency has been unable to reduce the number of annual new infections with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, from about 40,000, the report said.
``We've had a number of meetings with Senator Coburn's staff,'' Skinner said. ``We've provided an exhaustive amount of information over the past months and years regarding most if not all of the issues raised in this report.''
