WASHINGTON - The White House significantly edited testimony prepared for a Senate hearing on the impact of climate change on health, deleting key portions citing diseases that could flourish in a warmer climate, documents obtained by The Associated Press showed Wednesday.
The White House on Wednesday denied that it had "watered down" the congressional testimony that Dr. Julie Gerberding, director of Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, had given the day before to the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.
But a draft of the testimony submitted for White House review shows that six pages of details about specific disease and other health problems that might flourish if the Earth warms were not delivered at the hearing.
Gerberding on Wednesday downplayed the significance of the changes made in her prepared text saying she never felt she was being censored and that she was free to go beyond her text - and did when testifying. "I was absolutely happy with my testimony in Congress. We finally had a chance to go and say what we though was important," she said at a luncheon appearance in Atlanta.
Later, she added, "I don't let people put words in my mouth and I stand for science."
The draft noted that "scientific evidence supports the view that the earth's climate is changing" and that many groups are working to address climate change. "Despite this extensive activity, the public health effects of climate change remain largely unaddressed. CDC considers climate change a serious public health concern," the draft declares.
That paragraph was not in Gerberding's text as approved by the White House.
The draft document was obtained Wednesday by The Associated Press from a source other than the CDC, the Atlanta-based agency considered the government's premier disease tracking and monitoring agency.
Two people familiar with the documents told the AP on Tuesday, after the Senate hearing, that the White House Office of Management and Budget edited the CDC director's congressional testimony, removing specific scientific references to potential health risks.
Gerberding told a Senate hearing on Tuesday that climate change "is anticipated to have a broad range of impacts on the health of Americans."
But her prepared testimony was devoted almost entirely to the CDC's preparation, with few details on what effects climate change could have on the spread of disease. The prepared remarks covered six pages. The draft submitted for OMB was twice as long.
Referring to the draft, one CDC official familiar with both versions, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the review process, said that "it was eviscerated."
White House press secretary Dana Perino said the prepared testimony went through an interagency review process and the Office of Science and Technology Policy did not believe that the science in the testimony matched the science that was in a report by the International Panel on Climate Change.
"She testified yesterday. Her spokesperson said that she was able to say everything she wanted to say," Perino said. "It was not watered down in terms of its science. It wasn't watered down in terms of the concerns that climate change raises for public health."
The CDC official said that while it is customary for testimony to be changed in a White House review, these changes were particularly "heavy-handed."
The deleted sections of the draft, covering more than half of the original text, included a list of specific impacts on which "climate change is likely to have a significant impact on health." The list included the effect of more frequent hot spells on vulnerable populations, the impact of extreme weather, more air pollution in drought areas, and greater likelihood of vector-borne and waterborne diseases as well as mental health problems.
While these impacts would be expected to be less significant in the United States than in the developing world, one deleted section says, "nevertheless many Americans will likely experience difficult challenges."
"Climate change-driven ecological changes such as variations in rainfall and temperature could significantly alter the range, seasonality and human incident of many zoonotic and vector-borne diseases," the draft says in another section deleted.
At Tuesday's hearing, Gerberding addressed some of those issues during questioning from senators after she delivered her prepared remarks.
Senator Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), the committee chairman, produced a CDC chart, listing many of the same concerns -- deleted from Gerberding's draft text - that could be exacerbated by global warming.
"These are the potential things you can expect," replied Gerberding when asked about the items by Boxer. "... In some of these areas its not a question of if, it's a question of who, what, how and when."
