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Population Health
In Their Own Words
Loss of Vital Monitoring System Threatens Nation’s Health
Without Pressure From Congress, NHANES — Which Helped Uncover High Levels of Childhood Lead, Nutritional Deficiencies, and Forever Chemicals — Will Cease to Exist
Print:
This op-ed originally appeared in The Hill on February 15, 2026.
U.S. policymakers use a secret weapon to uncover widespread threats to public health. This tool enabled them to discover that Americans had high blood lead levels from leaded gasoline. It warned them when Americans were showing the first signs of the obesity epidemic. It helped them learn about the millions with high blood pressure who never knew they had it. The vitamins in baby formula that help infants grow strong and the nutrients added to basic foods like cereal and bread exist because this tool revealed what Americans were missing.
The tool, called the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, or NHANES, is a quiet surveillance system that alerts the nation to dangers we may not have seen otherwise.
Yet today NHANES itself is imperiled. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has eliminated the entire team responsible for planning and coordinating the survey, threatening the most consequential health database in U.S. history. If NHANES collapses, we can no longer track the chemicals accumulating in children’s bodies, the vitamins and nutrients Americans are lacking, or the silent growth of chronic diseases like diabetes. We will lose the information that guides food‑labeling policy, environmental protections, and preventative medicine practices used in every doctor’s office.
A country of 340 million people would, quite literally, no longer know the state of its own health.
Read the full op-ed here.
Author
Sean Hennessy, PharmD, PhD
Professor, Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Informatics and Professor, Systems Pharmacology and Translational Therapeutics, Perelman School of Medicine
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