Advocacy Mondays: BMI Advocacy Update

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A quick update on recent advocacy initiative on school-based BMI screening, surveillance and reporting.

EDC reports the following:

As a result of the Dear Colleague letter and conversations on our behalf with CDC about the concerns expressed within the Facts and Concerns About School-Based BMI Screening, Surveillance and Reporting , CDC decided to IMMEDIATELY start working on several changes to improve availability of information to schools conducting in-school screenings!! These immediate changes include:
  • CDC will update changes to the BMI measurement in schools information available on their Healthy Youth webpage:
    • Create a web page that emphasizes the safeguards and considerations outlined within the BMI Measurement in Schools journal article and executive summary
    • Send out the new page to CDC grantees and CDC partner organizations to disseminate
    • Offer the new page to the Department of Education to send out through their grantees and partner networks
  • Provided targeted webinars on this topic to:
    • Department of Education grantees (e.g., PEP grantees)
    • Presidential Youth Fitness Program grantees
    • CDC grantees funded for school health strategies (note: these make take more time to schedule and/or record)
  • Add cautionary, safeguard language to CDC’s BMI tool for school calculator webpage.
This is, in a word (actually 2 words),  Pretty Fantastic!

One more thing:  to help ensure that CDC  follows through on the request please call your Member of the House of Representatives and ask them to sign on to the Dear Colleague letter by Close of Business, Monday October 27, 2014. 

To make it easy full script for the phone call can be found here: http://www.eatingdisorderscoalition.org/documents/FallAdvocacyandLetters.pdf

 And see here for some media coverage of the matter.   Top down and bottom up!


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