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AMR: Why YOU Should Care

By Jill Inverso on October 29, 2018

This is the second installment in a blog series about awareness of antibacterial resistance that will lead to World Antibiotic Awareness Week, November 12-18, 2018. Check back for more blog posts throughout the coming weeks! Antibiotics are rarely heralded as medical innovations in news headlines. However, the reality is that antibiotics have represented the hidden backbone of modern medicine for several decades – enabling physicians to perform complex surgeries, and curing infections that were once considered life-threatening. Alarmingly, the future of antibiotics is now under threat due to the rise of antimicrobial resistance, or AMR. AMR refers to the process by which microbes mutate and...

A Weekly Advocacy Message From Mary Woolley: News you can use, for your health and for your advocacy

By Mary Woolley on October 25, 2018

Dear Research Advocate: Last week, the White House laid out its plan for all Cabinet departments to trim their proposed FY20 budgets by 5%. If, as anticipated, these cuts begin with the FY20 spending caps signed into law in 2011 (so-called ‘sequestration’), rather than actual FY19 budgets, the proposed cuts could be shockingly deep—in the 25% range. The potential impact on the NIH budget alone could be a cut of $9.77B, wiping out the increases of the last few years to the point of returning to 2013 funding levels and, when adjusting for inflation, 2001 spending power. Other agencies could take equivalent hits, compromising progress in achieving health goals and sending a clear message to...

A Weekly Advocacy Message from Mary Woolley: Public Health Demands Advocacy

By Mary Woolley on October 18, 2018

Dear Research Advocate: News broke this week that the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is struggling with a still-rising death toll due to Ebola, claiming more than 139 lives since July and spreading beyond the DRC. Meanwhile in the U.S., public health experts are working day and night to understand and overcome acute flaccid myelitis (AFM), now affecting children in 22 or more states. Ebola and AFM are public health crises today. It is predictable that there will be more unexpected crises on top of ongoing threats like the opioid epidemic, the increasing prevalence of obesity, chronic diseases and more. Which is why it defies common sense that investment in global health and in our...

Antibiotic Resistance: A Global Threat to Public Health

By Laura Rogers on October 15, 2018

This is the first installment in a blog series about awareness of antibacterial resistance that will lead to World Antibiotic Awareness Week, November 12-18, 2018. Check back for more blog posts throughout the coming weeks! When antibiotics were introduced as a medicine in the 1940s , they changed the face of medicine. The drugs quickly became the cornerstone of modern medicine. In a pre-antibiotic world, even a simple cut to the knee could kill if it became infected, as we had no reliable tools to kill bacteria. Antibiotics allowed thousands of soldiers from World War II to come home because their infections from the battlefield could be treated. By contrast, during World War I, one out of...

Knights Landing Environmental Health Project: Two Years of Responsive Community Health

By Skye Kelty and Alfonso Aranda on October 12, 2018

Knights Landing (KL) is an unincorporated agricultural town located 25 miles north of the University of Calfornia, Davis (UC Davis). Like many unincorporated agricultural communities in the California Central Valley, KL faces a number of challenges including transportation, access to medical care, access to healthy foods and water, immigration, poverty, housing shortages and environmental pollution. About three years ago, KL residents reported concerns about a high cancer risk in their community to UC Davis Chicana/o Studies professor, Natalia Deeb-Sossa, PhD. As a result, Dr. Deeb-Sossa recruited PhD students to address community needs through their research in cancer prevention and...

A Weekly Advocacy Message from Mary Woolley: Election Countdown Begins

By Mary Woolley on October 11, 2018

Dear Research Advocate: Earlier today, Rob Smith and Kim Monk of Capital Alpha Partners, and Pete Kirkham of Red Maple Consulting joined Research!America alliance members to discuss the near and mid-term outlook for congressional action on drug pricing, the state of play on appropriations, and other research-relevant issues. Although our speakers noted that much can change in the final week before the election, there were several key takeaways. First, it’s safe to say that the uncertainties surrounding the election and the ongoing interest (both in Congress and the White House) in addressing rising healthcare costs means that drug pricing and issues related to the supply chain more...

October 2018: The Research Advocate

By on October 5, 2018

The October 2018 newsletter is now online. Highlights from this month include : Research!America announced that The Honorable Louis W. Sullivan , former Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, would be among the honorees at the 2019 Advocacy Awards, to be held in Washington, D.C. on March 13, 2019. Other honorees include Dr. Susan Hockfield, President Emerita of the Massachusettes Institute of Technology; Dr. David R. Williams , of the Harvard H.T. Chan School of Public Health and Harvard University; Denny Sanford , founder of the Sanford Research Institute; and the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation . Georges C. Benjamin, MD , executive director of the American Public Health...

A weekly advocacy message from Mary Woolley: Bipartisanship matters

By Mary Woolley on October 4, 2018

Dear Research Advocate, Yesterday, the Senate passed a sweeping opioid package ( H.R. 6 ), previously passed by the House, and sent it to the President for his signature. It includes intensified research into new pain management therapies that factor importantly into a broad array of opioid response strategies. This can’t come too soon: according to a recent study from AHRQ, there were nearly 125,000 opioid-related hospitalizations among older Americans in 2015; more Americans died from drug overdoses in 2016 than the number of American lives lost -- 58,200 -- in the entirety of the Vietnam War. The opioid legislation is an excellent example of much needed bipartisanship; the FY19 Labor-H/...

Accelerating Innovation in Rare Disease Treatments: The Need for Collaboration

By Srini Ramanathan, PhD on October 1, 2018

Thirty million people in the United States are living with a rare disease and less than five percent of existing rare diseases have an approved treatment option . At Horizon Pharma, we are driven by a personal commitment to our patients to collaborate and innovate to close the innovation gap in rare disease. Conversations such as Research!America’s National Health Research Forum, which discussed the challenge of unmet medical needs , are vital in highlighting areas where cross-sector collaboration will enable us to find treatment options faster. Sitting alongside my fellow panelists, it was clear that while the challenges of unmet needs persist, our shared commitment will drive forward new...

AMR: Why YOU Should Care

A Weekly Advocacy Message From Mary Woolley: News you can use, for your health and for your advocacy

A Weekly Advocacy Message from Mary Woolley: Public Health Demands Advocacy

Antibiotic Resistance: A Global Threat to Public Health

Knights Landing Environmental Health Project: Two Years of Responsive Community Health

A Weekly Advocacy Message from Mary Woolley: Election Countdown Begins

October 2018: The Research Advocate

A weekly advocacy message from Mary Woolley: Bipartisanship matters

Accelerating Innovation in Rare Disease Treatments: The Need for Collaboration

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