Advocacy Victory!
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) keeps a close eye on the health of Americans by collecting data from individuals, hospitals, and healthcare providers. They call this “health surveillance.” The CDC’s health surveillance in communities across the country is often the only way we know when there is an outbreak of an infection, such as COVID-19, or rising rates of an illness, such as skin cancer, affecting one community or sometimes many communities. Collecting this information helps to keep track of trends that might either show prevention programs are working or maybe instead show that things are getting worse and the public health and healthcare communities need to respond by stepping up efforts to address the causes of illness and ensure there is treatment available to the communities in need.
This system can work really well when the right questions are asked on surveys, when the right data are counted. But the flip side of that is that if questions are not asked about a particular health issue, we really don’t know what’s happening and we might not even know a problem exists. Simply put, if you’re not counted, you don’t count. This is why STRIPED is leading a collaboration of national organizations, including the Academy for Eating Disorders, Eating Disorders Coalition, and the National Eating Disorders Association, to urge the CDC to include survey questions to track eating disorders across the country and to spot the early signs and symptoms. Once eating disorders are on the CDC’s radar and included in the agency’s national health surveillance surveys, we will be much more prepared to develop an appropriate and effective public health response.
Most recently, STRIPED has been focusing its efforts on the CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS), a representative survey of high school students in the U.S. For many years, the YRBS was one of the few sources of national data on the prevalence of disordered eating behaviors among youth. However, in 2015, items assessing disordered eating were removed from the YRBS questionnaire, leaving public health professionals and researchers without the necessary information to monitor trends and patterns in these behaviors. Getting these items back on to the questionnaire is of critical public health importance, which is why STRIPED has teamed up with an expert Eating Disorders Public Health Surveillance Working Group to advocate for their re-inclusion. Read a proposal that we submitted to the CDC in December 2021 to request the addition of disordered eating items onto the standard and/or national YRBS questionnaire.
