Dear Research Advocate, Congress has five weeks to reach an agreement on full-year FY20 funding levels before the current stop-gap continuing resolution (CR) expires on November 21, 2019. House spending leaders sent their Senate counterparts new totals for the 12 annual appropriations bills, but word is, negotiations on those topline amounts are far from over and concerns are mounting that Congress could resort to another short-term CR. CRs are the enemy of medical and public health progress: consider the recent NIH-supported finding that the artificial pancreas system controls blood glucose levels better than current technology in patients with Type 1 diabetes or promising results in...

“Many or most public health issues are inherently local, but the federal government still has an important role to play, and they have resources to bare when needed,” said Chrissie Juliano , Executive Director of the Big Cities Health Coalition (BCHC) . On September 23, 2019, the BCHC and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) , a Research!America member, addressed this topic in a briefing titled “The Measles Outbreaks of 2018/2019: Perspectives from Local Communities.” At this event, along with Ms. Juliano, spoke Dr. Colleen Kraft , Immediate Past President of AAP; Dr. Oxiris Barbot , Commissioner of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene; and Dr. Jeffrey Gunzenhauser...

Age-related Macular Degeneration (AMD) is a slow progression of blindness that affects 10 million Americans. It starts with slightly fuzzy vision, and continually worsens until the center of vision is so blurred the patient can no longer recognize faces, read, drive, or perform many other daily activities. At a recent briefing held by Research!America alliance member the National Alliance for Eye and Vision Research (NAEVR), ­patient activist Sydney Ruth Torrey of the American Macular Degeneration Foundation described the progression of AMD as “first annoying, then maddening, and finally devastating.” She expressed the heartbreak of Americans with AMD who find one day that their vision has...

Dear Research Advocate, This week was chock-full of federal appropriations activity bearing on the future of research, and ultimately, the future of health. While agency funding for Fiscal Year 2020 is far from resolved, some very positive and not-so-positive steps were taken by Congress. First, the Senate Appropriations Committee released its long-awaited Labor/HHS bill. The exciting headline is that NIH received a vital $3 billion increase, which, if enacted, would bring its total funding to $42.08 billion. The CDC, meanwhile, would receive an increase of only $180 million for a total budget of $7.46 billion. This increase is woefully insufficient to enable CDC’s 24/7 vigilance and...