Frustration over having to draw up an unemotional report on the homeless and then go into streets where people were ``ravaging garbage cans'' prompted dissent by most of the report's authors, one of them said today. Phyllis Wolfe, executive director of a private health care program for the homeless in the nation's capital, said that while gathering information for the report, panel members became outraged at conditions they found. ``It could just not be left in dots and dashes and graphs and figures,'' Ms. Wolfe said on ``CBS This Morning.'' Ms. Wolfe joined eight other members of the committee formed by the National Academy of Sciences' Institute of Medicine in issuing a supplementary statement that the institute refused to include in its report published Monday. The published report, ``Homelessness, Health and Human Needs,'' calls the growing number of homeless children ``a national disgrace.'' It recommends such measures as changing food stamp programs, increasing Medicaid services and expanding programs that help pre-school children. The authors of the supplementary statement said recommendations in the report were too limited. They said the country should supply more low-income housing, raise the minimum wage, offer more support services and guarantee homeless people adequate health care. Nine members of the 13-member panel signed the supplementary statement saying the main study ``fails to capture our sense of shame and anger about homelessness.'' The original report estimates that families with a total of 100,000 children are homeless on any given night, in addition to countless children who have run away from home or been kicked out by their parents. It says those under 18 are the fastest growing homeless group, and homelessness is increasing in many rural areas as well as in the nation's cities. Ms. Wolfe said the committee's work on the report was ``very structured,'' but members found themselves ``leaving committee meetings and walking by and seeing people ravaging garbage cans, seeing people suffering on the street.'' The supplementary statement itself expresses the same sentiment: ``We have reviewed the demographic and clinical data and then, walking home, passed men asleep on heating grates or displaced people energetically searching in garbage piles for a few cents' income from aluminum cans,'' it says. ``We analyzed mortality data for the homeless but lacked any platform from which to shout that our neighbors are dying needlessly because we are incapable of providing the most basic services.'' ``We can no longer sit as spectators to the elderly homeless dying of hypothermia, to the children with blighted futures poisoned by lead in rat-infested dilapidated welfare hotels, to women raped, to old men beaten and robbed of their few possessions, and to pepole dying on the streets with catastrophic illness such as AIDS,'' the supplementary report said. It said the committee members who dissented against the report's limited nature endorsed its long list of recommendations, but ``felt continuously uneasy because of our inability to state the most basic recommendation: homelessness in the United States is an inexcusable disgrace and must be eliminated.''
