Healthcare

A recent blog post by the president of a facility that experiments on chimpanzees grossly misrepresented the scientific and ethical reality of performing research on our closest genetic relatives. This discussion is one surrounding the Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act, a bill that has gained momentous support in the 112th Congress, and for good reason.
 
Only a handful of researchers do any form of experimentation on chimpanzees. The rest are warehoused in inadequate housing at great taxpayer expense.
 
Following recent Institute of Medicine (IOM) report findings that chimpanzees are not necessary for current medical research, laboratories have had to change their talking points from “chimpanzees are essential” to “what if we might need them one day.” This isn’t their concern about human health. This is a fight to keep the huge taxpayer-funded grants they receive to warehouse the chimpanzees in facilities that are noncompliant with recent IOM report criteria.

On Memorial Day, we will commemorate U.S. soldiers who have died in military service. We will pause in remembrance of those who sacrificed their lives in defense of our free Republic. This Memorial Day we give thanks to the men and women who devoted their lives to defending our freedom. It is the duty of our nation to honor and support our service members who have given up their lives for a greater cause than themselves.
 
Memorial Day is much more than a three-day weekend that marks the beginning of summer. It is a day we pay tribute to the soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines and Coasties who made the ultimate sacrifice for our nation. We mourn the lives lost in battle and we honor our nation’s heroes. Their sacrifice should be celebrated – never forgotten.

Ten years ago, most Americans had never heard of lupus - a chronic autoimmune disease. Today, through education and outreach, more people are becoming familiar with the serious impact lupus has on the health of an estimated 1.5 million Americans. With Congress actively considering reauthorization of the Prescription Drug User Fee Act (PDUFA), it has never been more important to focus on the future development of lupus drugs and what is needed to help people with lupus overcome their life-diminishing and life-threatening disease.
 
Consider the following: it is doubtful that more than 1,000 new critical treatments would have moved through the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) drug approval process in the last 20 years had PDUFA not been in place. Since its 1992 passage, PDUFA-provided user fees have helped the FDA fulfill its core function of ensuring safe and effective drugs are available to improve the health and well-being of Americans. PDUFA offers hope for new treatment for people who suffer from underserved and chronic diseases such as lupus by helping expedite the drug approval process, resulting in new drugs getting to patients in a more timely and efficient manner.

Republicans were quick to cozy up with Catholic bishops in opposition to the Obama Administration's requirement that contraception be covered at no cost under health insurance plans. These days the GOP has its own prickly Catholic problem.

Catholic bishops have sized up the GOP budget proposal – praised by presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney  – and found it morally bankrupt. In a series of stinging letters to the House of Representatives, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops condemned the budget for slashing anti-hunger programs and asking the most vulnerable to bear a disproportionate burden while the richest Americans are given more tax breaks. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), a conservative wunderkind and architect of the budget, has claimed these proposals are inspired by the values of his Catholic faith. Bishops and other Catholic leaders are not letting him get away with that fiction.

A recent blog on the Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act by Kristin Bauer and Martin Wasserman (A shared passion for ending chimpanzee experiments, May 9, 2012) was filled with inaccuracies, some of which are refuted below.
 
The authors assert that “. . . the Institute of Medicine’s recent report on chimpanzee experimentation found that chimpanzees aren’t needed for a single area of human health research.”

In fact, the Great Ape Protection Act would eliminate chimpanzee research despite the findings of the Institute of Medicine (IOM) report and the charge to the National Institutes of Health Working Group on the Use of Chimpanzees in NIH-Supported Research.

There is an old story that’s told around major league baseball parks. An umpire, whose name is lost to the mists of time, reported for duty one evening.  He had brought two people with him, and stopped at the stadium’s business office to see if he could get them passes to watch the game. The team’s representative wasn’t sure whether this request could be granted, so he phoned the team’s general manager for help.
 
“One of tonight’s umpires is here,” he said, “and he wants to know if he can get free tickets for two of his friends.”  “Absolutely not—the guy’s a fake,” the GM responded immediately. “Umpires don’t have any friends.”

The Food and Drug Administration’s long-awaited policy announcement on antibiotic use in food animals has accomplished an almost impossible Beltway feat – just about everyone’s happy about it.
 
The new policy aligns antibiotic use in animals and humans and eliminates the use of antibiotics as growth promoters, similar to the European ban on antibiotic growth promoters. The FDA’s new guidance requires that all medically important antibiotics used in animal agriculture be administered with the supervision of a licensed veterinarian for therapeutic purposes -- meaning disease treatment, control and prevention. Use for growth promotion will be phased out. Medicines will now be used in animal health much the same way they are by humans –to address disease and under the watchful eye of a licensed medical professional.

Throughout the history of our Republic, religious freedom has been one of our nation’s core founding principles and a central part of our American heritage. A key component of that freedom is a respect for the rights of religious people and institutions to practice their faiths without the fear of being compelled to engage in, or support, acts that go against their deeply held religious beliefs. In 1809, Thomas Jefferson rightly said, “No provision in our Constitution ought to be dearer to man than that which protects the rights of conscience against the enterprises of the civil authority."
 
Today, this proud tradition, our most cherished freedom is under attack, coming from the Obama Administration’s HHS mandate. This policy would, for the first time in our nation’s history, trample on religious freedom and force, inter alia, religious institutions to violate their own faith,  jeopardizing the great work that they do every day serving those in need, regardless of their faith. Fortunately, leaders of all faiths have awakened to the dangerously far-reaching implications of this policy and understand the precedent it will set. Rabbis, priests, ministers, Republicans and Democrats are joining together to oppose this mandate, which would sweep conscience protections of the First Amendment under the rug.

It wasn’t that long ago when asthma and severe allergies, like anaphylaxis, were treated with fumigating powders, caustic vapors, opium and stramonium cigarettes. Patients were debilitated, unable to work, go to school and many died.
 
The last 30 years have brought radical advancements in research, technology, medical devices and treatment. Federally funded evidence-based national asthma and anaphylaxis treatment guidelines are shown to prevent needless death and suffering while reducing healthcare costs.

Yet a new paradigm to cut healthcare costs proposed by the Food and Drug Administration threatens to deliver us back to the dark ages.

We might seem like an unlikely couple: one of us is a Hollywood actress who plays a vampire on True Blood, the other a physician who served as the medical director of immunization practices in the vaccine division of GlaxoSmithKline Pharmaceuticals. But a common desire brings us together: improving human health and ending cruel chimpanzee experiments by passing the Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act of 2012.
 
We know that it’s a critical moment for this bill. The legislation currently has more than 175 congressional co-sponsors who want to see it pass this year for scientific, financial and ethical reasons.
 
The Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act will help the United States move toward more effective treatments for a laundry list of human diseases. It will save more than $330 million in taxpayer dollars over the next decade. And it will help the nearly 1,000 chimpanzees currently suffering in U.S. laboratories.