On January 19, 2011, the Center for Science in the Public Interest released its report, "All Over the Map - a 10-Year Review of State Outbreak Reporting."  Here is its announcement containing links to related materials.  At 9:06 AM the next morning, I made the following comment on this article about it in Food Safety News

Here we have yet another example of the claptrap* that Carolyn Smith DeWaal and CSPI passes off (usually successfully in American media) as serious investigations that illuminate something significant about an important issue.

Don’t be misled.  The primary purpose of this “report” is to advance CSPI’s political agenda by further inflaming all discussions.

At least in the realm of food safety, the claim of CSPI being the “center for science in the public interest” is not only not true but also dissembling. 

The meaningfulness of this 76 page report (http://cspinet.org/new/pdf/alloverthemap.pdf) is buried in the middle of FSN’s article.  As Dr. Bill Keene, senior epidemiologist at the Oregon Health Department, said, "Their rankings are objective in only the crudest sense...People measure stuff that is easy to measure, and then think it's important because they don't have any other measures."

CSPI’s dissembling is further shown on p. 11 of the report, under “Uses and Limitations of the Study” where the authors acknowledge, “State profiles should not be used to directly compare the 10-year reporting performances between individual states…Only individual state public health departments will know, for example, whether…a dearth of reported outbreaks may indicate a particularly good year for food safety in the state—or a severely hampered or inept reporting system.”  Despite admitting the information “should not be used to directly compare…individual states,” Carolyn Smith DeWaal and CSPI still does exactly that with iconic letter grades.  The clear purpose of CSPI's grades is shown in ordering of the legend of the colored map in Figure 2 on page 3.  It is from “F” through “A,” rather than the usual reverse.

And don’t overlook the fact that by CSPI’s methodology for assigning grades would mean the worse a state’s regulation of prepared food (by far the largest source of foodborne illness), the higher the state’s grade would be!

Later today, I will expand my critique on www.healthyfoodcoalition.org.

*The first meaning, of “claptrap” listed in Dictionary.com Unabridged by Random House, Inc. (“pretentious but insincere or empty language: His speeches seem erudite but analysis reveals them to be mere claptrap”) is exactly the way in which I am using this word.

 I am currently analyzing the report and composing a more lengthy critique.  Due to time demands, I will probably publish my critique in pieces over the next week.

To assist readers who are monitoring it, I will show each time I update it with a "(last updated)" tag at the bottom.

(last updated at 1:57 PM on 1-20-11)