In an attempt to raise the nation's historically low rate of breast-feeding, federal health officials commissioned an attention-grabbing advertising campaign a few years ago to convince mothers that their babies faced real health risks if they did not breast-feed. It featured striking photos of insulin syringes and asthma inhalers topped with rubber nipples.
Plans to run these blunt ads infuriated the politically powerful infant formula industry, which hired a former chairman of the Republican National Committee and a former top regulatory official to lobby the Health and Human Services Department. Not long afterward, department political appointees toned down the campaign.
Friday, Aug. 31
Lobby Tones Down Fed Breastfeeding Campaign
Washington Post science reporters Marc Kaufman and Christopher Lee discuss how the infant formula industry successfully lobbied the Health and Human Services Department to tone down ads warning mothers of the health risks faced by babies who aren't breast-fed.
The federal Office on Women's Health developed an ad campaign several years ago that included insulin syringes and asthma puffers that looked like bottles of formula to make women aware of the risks of passing up breast-feeding.The formula industry objected to the campaign and brought in powerful lobbyists, including Clayton Yeutter, who was agriculture secretary during the administration of George H.W. Bush.In the end, the agency dropped many of the hard-hitting ads and kept the more soft-focus ones, including images of dandelions puffs and ice cream scoops that looked like breasts. In the 2004 letter at right, Yeutter thanks the secretary of health and human services for modifying the ad campaign
The ads ran instead with more friendly images of dandelions and cherry-topped ice cream scoops, to dramatize how breast-feeding could help avert respiratory problems and obesity. In a February 2004 letter (pdf), the lobbyists told then-HHS Secretary Tommy G. Thompson they were "grateful" for his staff's intervention to stop health officials from "scaring expectant mothers into breast-feeding," and asked for help in scaling back more of the ads.
The formula industry's intervention -- which did not block the ads but helped change their content -- is being scrutinized by Congress in the wake of last month's testimony by former surgeon general Richard H. Carmona that the Bush administration repeatedly allowed political considerations to interfere with his efforts to promote public health.
Rep. Henry A. Waxman's Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is investigating allegations from former officials that Carmona was blocked from participating in the breast-feeding advocacy effort and that those designing the ad campaign were overruled by superiors at the formula industry's insistence.
"This is a credible allegation of political interference that might have had serious public health consequences," said Waxman, a California Democrat.
The milder campaign HHS eventually used had no discernible impact on the nation's breast-feeding rate, which lags behind the rate in many European countries.
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Breasts and Bush
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Barbara Fitzpatrick
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