Tag Archives: NIH
Healthcare groups bash Trump’s budget proposal: Cuts threaten public health
Nurses, docs and medical research groups said the budget cuts proposed by President Donald Trump threaten the future of healthcare.
Among the cuts: Nearly 18% of HHS’ budget, with the largest cuts coming to National Institutes of Health. The agency would see a $5.9 million decrease in its budget and a significant reorganization effort that would fold the Agency for Healthcare Quality and Research into its ranks and close the Fogarty International Center
Nurses came out in force against the budget cuts. The American Nurses Association urged Congress to reject Trump’s proposal, which they said in a statement will “weaken the nation’s healthcare system and jeopardize the scientific research needed to keep America healthy.”
The ANA is especially upset about plans to reduce funding for health professions and nursing workforce programs by $403 million. The proposal “drastically hampers efforts to address critical faculty shortages and recruit new nurses into the profession,” the association said.
Furthermore, the National Nurses United called the cuts a “broad attack on public protections that also targets some of the nation’s most vulnerable people while shifting resources to the least needed areas.”
The American Public Health Association agreed, stating that the proposal undermines the health and well-being of Americans.
“Cuts to these agencies would threaten programs that protect the public from the next infectious disease outbreak, polluted air and water, health threats due to climate change and our growing chronic disease epidemic,” APHA Executive Director Georges C. Benjamin, M.D., said in the statement.
And Andrew Gurman, M.D., president of the American Medical Association, said the cuts cause great concerns about future medical research and public health in general and in the wake of Zika, Ebola.
The Association of American Medical Colleges noted in a statement that medical research can’t be “turned on and off like a faucet.” Indeed, “the proposed cuts would set back progress toward critical advancements that could take decades to regain, prevent new ideas from being explored, and have a chilling effect on those who would potentially enter the biomedical research workforce.”
And the American Cancer Society said the reduction in funding would set cancer research back at least two decades.
“For the last 50 years every major medical breakthrough can be traced back to investments in the NIH,” Chris Hansen, president of the ACS Cancer Action Network, said in the statement. “Because of these investments, there are more than 15.5 million American cancer survivors alive today and researchers stand on the cusp of numerous innovative new diagnostic tools and treatments.”
Sepsis Tops Conditions Tracked for Readmission Rates, but Triggers No Penalties
Sepsis has a higher rate of readmission than heart failure, but the federal government does not penalize hospitals for excessive readmissions due to sepsis.
Hidden Conflicts of Interest Found Throughout Medicine
http://www.medpagetoday.com/PublicHealthPolicy/Ethics/62565?xid=fb_o_
JAMA Internal Medicine series highlights pervasiveness of problems
Precision Medicine Has Bipartisan Support, Proponents Assure Amid Trump Administration Transition
At a cocktail reception in Boston last week ahead of an annual meeting on personalized medicine, attendees milled around not talking about the latest advances in genomics or the challenges of companion diagnostics development. They were too preoccupied with the impact of the Presidential elections the week before.
Will the new administration value genomics research and personalized medicine projects going on around the country that depend on government funding? How will a change in administration and priorities impact projects such as the Precision Medicine Initiative (PMI) and the Cancer Moonshot? Who will head up the US Department of Health and Human Services, the National Institutes of Health, and the US Food and Drug Administration? And will these new government officials continue efforts of the last administration to advance data sharing, privacy protections, and integrated systems critical for the implementation of personalized medicine?
21st Century Cures Act: 4 health industry impacts summarized
http://www.healthcaredive.com/news/21st-century-cures-act-explained/431491/
On Wednesday, the Senate voted 94-5 to pass the long-awaited 21st Century Cures Bill. As it has backing from the current White House administration, President Barack Obama is expected to sign the legislation into law.
The law has been called the “most important bill of the year” by Senator Lamar Alexander (R-TN), as Politico Pulse reported Tuesday. The bill, while bipartisan, is not without controversy. While the House version of the legislation passed swimmingly with a vote of 392-26, the bill did have its share of opponents in the Senate– including Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) – who think the bill is too favorable to pharmaceutical companies. Both Sanders and Warren were among the five Senators to vote against the measure.
And as Modern Healthcare’s Merrill Goozner notes in an editorial, it’s likely the true impact of the bill won’t be known right away but will be realized as the years pass. “The final details of the 996-page legislation…weren’t known until five days before it passed,” Goozner wrote.
About three years of work and efforts from 1,400 lobbyists for 400 companies went into the making of this $6.3 billion package. It seeks to deliberately speed medical research and treatments. Because seemingly no healthcare legislation can be a reasonable length (it’s about 90 pages longer than the ACA) and because nothing in healthcare is simple, we’ve summarized some of the notable implications of the bill in four buckets: Health IT, mental health, FDA reform and research and care funding.
‘Superbug’ scourge spreads as U.S. fails to track rising human toll
http://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-uncounted-surveillance/
Fifteen years after the U.S. declared drug-resistant infections to be a grave threat, the crisis is only worsening, a Reuters investigation finds, as government agencies remain unwilling or unable to impose reporting requirements on a healthcare industry that often hides the problem.
NIH considering restarting funding for human-animal chimera research
NIH considering restarting funding for human-animal chimera research
Federal health officials said Thursday they are reconsidering a moratorium on the funding of research in which human tissues are transplanted into early, nonhuman embryos — creating organisms known as chimeras.
The proposed rule changes, which the National Institutes of Health announced in a blog post, would allow the agency to pay for experiments that incorporate human tissue into early-stage animal embryos, except for those of primates like monkeys and chimps.
Congress Shouldn’t Pass The 21st Century Cures Act In A Summer Rush
On Saturday June 25, six former FDA commissioners from Democratic and Republican administrations suggested at the Aspen Ideas Festival that Congress make the agency independent of the Department of Health and Human Services — similar to the Securities Exchange Commission, for example. With regulatory purview over products that represent a quarter of the U.S. economy, the group said the FDA is harmed by an unstable federal budget process and persistent political meddling. The group said they would issue a white paper on their proposal for the next administration. That’s another reason why Congress should postpone consideration of these bills until 2017.
Leading researchers recommend major change in prostate cancer treatment
Leading American and British cancer researchers are urging that all men with advanced prostate cancer strongly consider being tested for inherited gene mutations — both to help steer their treatment and to alert family members who themselves might be at increased risk for a range of cancers.
This new recommendation, which represents a major change in approach, was prompted by a study published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine. The researchers found that almost 12 percent of men with advanced cancer had defects in genes that are designed to fix damage to DNA, compared to 4.6 percent of patients with disease that hadn’t spread.
HENRY KOTULA 