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  2. HHS: What is "scientific accuracy"?

HHS: What is "scientific accuracy"?

By tfk on November 16, 2006.

TPMmuckraker reports:

According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), HHS last year spent $153 million on abstinence education programs…

Set aside the issue of whether they do any good. GAO tried to see if they did any harm, and concluded they did: Some of the abstinence programs are telling kids stuff that just isn't true. The GAO cites one program which told kids that HIV can pass through latex condoms, because latex is porous. (That's false.)

The GAO gave the reasonable-sounding recommendation to HHS that it ensure that all information given to kids through these programs should be scientifically accurate.

If only the world were so simple! In response, the Department of Health and Human Services -- which has on staff more than a few scientists and other educated types -- said the GAO's suggestion was useless. "GAO never defines the term 'scientific accuracy' in its report," HHS complained. "As such, it is difficult to precisely determine the criteria employed by GAO in making the recommendations as to scientific accuracy."

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I consider "abstinence programs" to be as useful and as damaging as the catholic church's condemnation of condom use for the prevention of sexually transmitted disease.

Counties which consider sex to be "sinful" (except under special circumstances like a religious marriage), and which consider sex to be "dirty" and unnatural; present with higher instances of teenage pregnancies and higher abortion rates.

Want to increase the level of teenage pregnancy? Want to increase the abortion rate? Promote abstinence and frown on contraception.

I heard about this on the radio this morning. It was bad enough to hear that there was no outside evaluation of scientific accuracy, but then they went on to say that there was no self-evaluation either. What sort of results could be expected from self-evaluation, when the "self" consists of ideological zealots?

The bit about condoms being porous is a standard item in many Catholic schools here in Ontario (usually from a priest that is doing a talk - I've never heard a teacher say that).

I asked my first-year college biology students if they'd heard that one, and only kids who attended Catholic high schools said yes.