CDC Team Investigates an Outbreak of Obesity

Next assignment: a pandemic of stupidity.

New York Times
By GINA KOLATA
Published: June 3, 2005

C.D.C. Team Investigates an Outbreak of Obesity

For the first time, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has sent a team of specialists into a state, West Virginia, to study an outbreak of obesity in the same way it studies an outbreak of an infectious disease.

Kerri Kennedy, the program manager at the West Virginia Physical Activity and Nutrition Program, said the state had requested the agency's investigation.

"We were looking at our data," Ms. Kennedy said, and saw that "we are facing a severe health crisis."

The state ranked third in the nation for obesity - 27.6 percent of its adults were obese, compared with 20.4 percent in the country as a whole. And, Ms. Kennedy said, "our rate of obesity appears to be increasing faster than the rest of the nation."

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