The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Saturday issued a warning, asking people to not swim with diarrhea. While their notice highlighted the guidelines for a person wanting to use public pools this summer, all people were stuck on was the GIF they posted with the guidelines. 

The CDC posted a visual of a girl going down a slide leaving a brown streak behind.” One person with diarrhea can contaminate the entire pool,” the agency wrote. The GIF caught the internet’s attention as people. They pointed out that the taxpayer’s money may have been completely wasted behind the ‘image of a girl pooping on a water slide’.

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This is not the first time the CDC has been subject to backlash. Here are the other instances:

1) Tuskegee study of untreated syphilis:

Hundreds of poor black men, who were promised free blood tests and treatment by the County Health Department and Government Doctors. unknowingly signed up for CDC’s syphilis experiment. These men, nearly 400 of whom had syphilis, were studied to know more about the disease.  However, the disease was left untreated. This study, without the informed consent of these men, carried on from 1932 to 1972 under the direct oversight of the CDC.

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2) CDC Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR):

The CDC report published in 2020 faced pressure from the White House. According to reports, the political appointees at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) under Donald Trump’s administration asked the CDC to modify its reporting so as not to conflict with what the then-President was saying about the pandemic. In email revelations, the chief advisor to the HHS  assistant secretary for public affairs Paul Alexander accused CDC scientists of attempting to ‘hurt the president’ and writing ‘hit pieces on the administration’.

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3) COVID-19 test malfunctions:

In February last year, the US Department of Health and Human Services found that it was investigating the defect in many of the initial coronavirus test kits produced by the CDC. This stalled testing in the country for about six weeks.

The FDA and the Department of Health and Human Services found that the CDC had violated its own protocols in developing its tests. CDC Director Robert R. Redfield reassured fellow officials on the White House Coronavirus Task Force that the problem would be quickly solved.

It was in November 2020, that an NPR report revealed that the CDC was aware that the first batch of tests that were issued in early January had a chance of being wrong 33% of the time, but they released them anyway.