Dear Editor,
I wonder if I have ever read an article so full of untruths and incorrect information as the one in your edition of yesterday, 11 July, with the headline "Trinidad tops obesity list in the Caribbean." This headline itself is already false since everyone who takes the effort to read the report of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization for him/herself will find that with a percentage of 42.0, it is St. Kitts & Nevis that tops this list and not Trinidad & Tobago with 30 per cent. In fact, Trinidad is also preceded by the Bahamas (35 per cent) and Barbados (33.4 per cent). I am not sure if the 'CMC' quoted as the source at the end of the article stands for the Caribbean Medical Center (or Clinic) in Port-of-Spain? If so, they seem to have a very peculiar view of what constitutes the Caribbean.
Not only is the first sentence (same message as the headline) therefore incorrect, so is the second. Trinidad & Tobago is not ranked sixth among all countries worldwide, but 27th. And then the third sentence: also not true since Mexico is far from at the top of the list because with its 32.8 percent it "only" ranks 20th. Because of what I stated in my first paragraph, the fifth sentence is also wrong as Antigua & Barbuda is not the second Caribbean island on the chart, but the fifth (and if you consider Belize a Caribbean country, then the sixth). Also, it is not number 18 worldwide but shares the 39th/40th/41st places with Surinam and Panama. It follows from the above that the information in that sentence about St. Vincent & the Grenadines and Dominica is also incorrect.
Obviously, the last sentence of the article is therefore also false (I have kind of exhausted synonyms for untrue.
Readers can find the report here: http://www.fao.org/docrep/018/i3300e/i3300e.pdf. It is amazing that when you check things for yourself you find that of an article of seven sentences, five are demonstrably incorrect. It makes you wonder what else you read in the Daily Herald (and other newspapers as well of course) is not reflecting the truth. I would advise the editors of the Daily Herald to be more cautious when taking over information from second sources. And I would advise the general public that when possible, it is always best to check information for yourself or at least to refer to information that is in the newspaper as exactly that: as "what you read in the newspaper" rather than as "the truth."
Hoping to have done both the editors of the Daily Herald and its readers a service.
Yours truly,
R. Guss