Budget Cuts Take Aim at Medical Programs

By LAURAN NEERGAARD

WASHINGTON – From screening newborns for hearing problems to efforts to fight heart disease and find causes of premature birth, some innovative medical programs demanded by families are on the government chopping block.

President Bush’s proposed budget for 2007 contains what his health secretary called “hard choices” when it came to devising how much to spend on a host of competing ailments.

Even the usually favored National Institutes of Health – the nation’s lead agency in the hunt for the causes, treatments and ways to prevent diseases – didn’t get a raise, receiving flat funding of $28.6 billion.

Account for inflation, and that’s really a cut, argued Dr. Robert Eckel, president of the American Heart Association. In inflation-adjusted terms, Bush’s budget would cause a nearly 10 percent drop in spending in medical research since 2003.

Some NIH divisions will lose money: $40 million from the National Cancer Institute, and $11 million from the diabetes institute, at a time when Type 2 diabetes is skyrocketing. The NIH this year will spend $8 per American researching heart disease, the nation’s leading killer, an amount the heart association decried even before spotting a planned $21 million cut for the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute.

Some programs proposed for elimination are those that families have intensely lobbied Congress to enact:

-Universal newborn hearing screening, a $10 million program that helps states provide those tests for poor families, usually administering them before babies leave the hospital. Detecting hearing loss early helps ensure that babies get appropriate services so they learn and develop properly.

-A federal program that provides lifesaving defibrillators to communities, especially in rural parts of the country. Some 300,000 people a year die of cardiac arrest, where the heart suddenly stops. Death occurs in minutes, long before an ambulance can reach most victims, unless someone nearby uses a portable defibrillator to help jump-start the heart.

-The largest study of U.S. children ever performed. In January, mothers-to-be were to begin enrolling in the National Children’s Study to track 100,000 children from mothers’ wombs to age 21 to see how the environment – everything from mother’s diet to toddler TV to pollution – influences child health. Scientists hoped the first births in the study would point toward some preventable causes of such problems as premature birth, asthma and autism. Ordered by Congress and supported by both medical groups and the chemical industry, scientists already have spent $60 million in tax dollars preparing the study, with waiting lists of families hoping to participate.

But NIH budget documents direct researchers instead to close the program down by year’s end.

“This is an affront to America’s children. It will really hurt children today and for decades to come,” said Dr. Alan Fleischman of the New York Academy of Medicine, who chairs the study’s federal advisory committee.

NIH Director Elias Zerhouni defended the budget, saying his agency retained enough flexibility to direct money to the most promising research avenues.

“I think it’s very clear that what you call cuts … what we have to recognize is that you have to do prioritization,” he said.