The article didn&#x27;t imply at all that the factors were directly related. The CDC is tasked with finding health information and trends in the population. If they&#x27;re missing a large, segment of the population that has very different health trends than the rest of the population, that&#x27;s a problem and they want to address it, no matter what the reasoning behind the correlation is.<p>They did talk about controlling for age and income in the article. While the effect was reduced, it was still there. So I&#x27;m not entirely sure what your point is, based on the article.