Guardian Unlimited | Special reports: "West Virginia is used to indignity. Its Appalachian hills are a byword for poverty and its people derided as hillbillies.
Now insult has been added to injury in what will be seen as an unwelcome first in the history of the United States.
A team of federal 'disease detectives', normally sent to combat outbreaks of infectious bugs, has been dispatched to the state to chart its frightening obesity epidemic. Epidemiologists from the Centres for Disease Control (CDC) have never before been deployed in this fashion, and it reflects the growing anxiety about the threat obesity poses to the health of the nation as a whole."
different voices
10 years ago