Society Advocates Fight for Cancer Research Funding(printed in e-Newsline of the LLS: May 20, 2007):
At this year’s Mission Day, held March 19-20, in Washington, DC, some 300 Society advocates gathered on Capitol Hill to urge their representatives to address the needs of blood cancer patients and their families.
The top issue was the lack of funding to sustain the war on cancer. Funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Cancer Institute (NCI) support the majority of cancer research conducted at academic and community cancer centers around the country. Congress doubled the budget for those institutions from 1999 to 2003. Since that time, however, Congress failed time and again to provide sufficient funding to keep pace with inflation, let alone expand on medical research breakthroughs.
Accounting for inflation in medical research costs, the NIH budget for fiscal year 2005 was actually $1.75 billion or 6.2 percent lower than when the doubling was completed in 2003. In fiscal 2006, that trend intensified with an actual cut of $33 million to the NIH budget, for a total of $28 billion. In that same year, NCI received a deep cut in funding for a total of $4.8 billion. The administration’s 2006 budget proposal included an additional reduction for NCI of $40 million – a $186 million decrease relative to the amount needed to maintain current spending adjusted for inflation.
For his fiscal year 2007 proposal, President Bush called for a freeze on NIH spending at 2006 funding levels. After the election, the new Congress was finally able to come to an agreement on 2007 spending in January of this year – essentially funding the NCI at 2006 levels.
These budget cuts are now threatening the future of cancer research that might save more lives. Consider some specifics:
The NCI is facing a 10-percent budget cut for the cancer cooperative groups that coordinate and conduct clinical trials into new therapies. One of the groups, the Children’s Oncology Group, will cut clinical trials by 400 patients.
These cuts would eliminate 95 new clinical trials and reduce patient enrollment by 3,000.
Even in 2002, when the research budget was growing, the government approved only one-in-five promising proposals for new research. Now only one-in-10 is funded.
Individual labs are experiencing cuts of as much as 30 percent. Scientific leaders fear we are in jeopardy of losing a whole generation of scientists.
There is time to reverse these trends, however. In their meetings with legislators, Society advocates urged Congress to increase NIH and NCI funding by 6.7 percent for each of the next three years. That would restore funding to 2003 inflation-adjusted levels and continue the pace of research and discovery.
In this year, more than ever, Society advocates, scientists, clinicians, nurses, patients and families need to be loud
and insistent that cancer funding be restored as a top national priority.
To help the Society advocate for cures, please visit the “Advocacy” section at www.LLS.org . The site offers extensive resources to help with contacting legislators, crafting messages and keeping people up to date about issues that concern blood cancer patients and their families. The Society also publishes numerous free, online eNewsletters. To subscribe, visit the “Free eNewsletters” section on the bottom right of the
www.LLS.org homepage.