Dear Research Advocate, Our guest author this week is Ellie Dehoney, Research!America’s Vice President of Policy and Advocacy. Gun violence is a fact of our lives, a relentless public health and safety threat punctuated by two horrific mass murders over the past seven days. The current appropriations process provides an opportunity to address one of the challenges impeding efforts to address this threat: gaps in the research needed to test assumptions and craft evidence-based solutions. Earlier this summer, the House passed $50 million for CDC and NIH-funded gun violence research as part of its Fiscal Year 2020 Labor-H appropriations bill. However, the fate of this funding is uncertain. Use...

“Sixteen years ago we had in front of us, for the first time ever, the order of the three billion letters that make up the human genome,” began Dr. Eric Green , Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) . Genetic sequencing and genomics have come a long way since 2003, when the Human Genome Project announced the completion of the first full sequence of the human genome. At the “ Human Genome to Precision Medicine ” briefing hosted by the Congressional Biomedical Research Caucus and the Coalition for the Life Sciences , Dr. Green discussed the triumphs, advances, and ongoing challenges unfolding around genomics. The cost of sequencing that first genome was around $1...

Dear Research Advocate, Our guest author this week is Jenny Luray, Research!America’s Senior Advisor. Before traveling home for the August district work period, the House finally passed legislation to raise the budget caps by a vote of 284 - 149. Monday evening brought the welcome announcement that the White House and congressional leadership had reached a bipartisan, bicameral budget deal . The deal lifts the caps, increasing federal spending levels in FY2020 and FY2021, and also raises the debt ceiling. Specifically, the deal increases non-defense discretionary spending by $27 billion in FY20 and $2.5 billion in FY21. It prevents a $55 billion cut from occurring and instead bolsters the...

Infectious disease outbreaks. Opioid overdoses. Chemical exposures. When threats like these arise, we rely on public health surveillance efforts to identify and address them. However, our current systems are outdated and disjointed, hindering the ability of public health professionals to respond to such crises in a timely manner. On June 27, 2019, the Association of Public Health Laboratories (APHL), the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists (CSTE), the Healthcare Information Management Systems Society (HIMSS), and the National Association for Public Health Statistics and Information Systems (NAPHSIS) held a Capitol Hill briefing focused on the critical need to update America’s...