WASHINGTON June 14, 2012 Following is a statement from Christopher W. Hansen, president of the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network (ACS CAN), about today 's Senate Appropriations Committee vote on the bill to fund the Department of Health and Human Services:
We appreciate that the bill provides a $100 million increase in funding to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) budget in this tough budget environment. But the amount doesn 't keep pace with the growing cost of medical research, and continues a multi-year trend that threatens progress in the fight to eliminate death and suffering from a disease that is expected to kill nearly 570,000 Americans this year.
The bill that passed out of committee today could slow progress in the fight to defeat cancer with a limited increase for research funding and flat funding for proven prevention programs that have suffered years of cuts.
By freezing funding for proven cancer prevention and control programs at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the bill would enable only a fraction of those who are eligible to access services that could detect cancer early or in some cases prevent it altogether.
We recognize the challenges lawmakers face in this current budget environment, but we are concerned that as a nation we are wasting opportunities to leverage past discovery and compromising our ability to make further strides in our efforts to defeat this disease. Further, with fewer than 1 in 5 NIH grant applications receiving funding at current levels, if we continue to underfund critical research we risk losing talented scientists, we risk leaving potential progress to languish in the labs, and we risk losing our status as a world leader in biomedical research.
Sustaining robust funding for cancer research and prevention must be a national priority, and we urge Congress to further increase funding for the NIH, the National Cancer Institute and the CDC in a final spending bill.
More than 1.6 million Americans will be diagnosed with cancer this year and the number is expected to grow as baby boomers age in the coming years. We can 't afford to wait for a better budget environment to address this critical public health issue.
ACS CAN, the nonprofit, nonpartisan advocacy affiliate of the American Cancer Society, supports evidence-based policy and legislative solutions designed to eliminate cancer as a major health problem. ACS CAN works to encourage elected officials and candidates to make cancer a top national priority. ACS CAN gives ordinary people extraordinary power to fight cancer with the training and tools they need to make their voices heard. For more information, visit www.fightcancer.org.
FOR MORE INFORMATION, CONTACT:
Alissa Crispino or Steven Weiss
American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network
Phone: (202) 661-5772 or (202) 661-5711
Email: [email protected] or [email protected]
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