Fight for Funding of Tick-borne Diseases

David Posnett — Mon, 07 Aug 2017 10:28:33 +0000

Published in the EH Star 8/3/2017

Dear Editor,

To anyone living on the East End it is apparent that tick-borne diseases are a health crisis. We need the federal government to provide funding on both the local and national level for this public health emergency. And yet the Trump administration’s proposed budget cuts funding to the National Institutes of Health by 20 percent (nearly $6 billion) and to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention by 17 percent ($1.2 billion).

Lee Zeldin, we need you to stand up to your own party and demand that funding be increased to these entities. If we’ve seen anything over the past decades, it’s that diseases can be controlled, and in some cases eradicated, by the dedicated efforts of legislators who care enough to fight for funding so that researchers and physicians have the resources to tackle these problems.

CAROL DEISTLER, Springs

I checked the NIH funding for Lyme disease for CD-1 versus the entire state of NY (in dollars x 1000), see below. * projected numbers are provided by the NIH but are subject to budget changes dictated by Congress.

	2013	2014	2015	2016	2017	2018
NYS	1880	1766	2539	2207	stable*	decrease*
CD1	657	691	767	236
% CD1/NYS	0.34	0.39	0.30	0.10

Note the slippage in the share of NIH research dollars for CD-1 since Zeldin has been in office (2014). We have gone from 39% to 10% of state wide funding for Lyme Disease Research in CD-1. That is nothing to brag about.

Source: https://report.nih.gov/categorical_spending.aspx

David Posnett MD

tick-borne – R&R – Reachout and Rebuild

Fight for Funding of Tick-borne Diseases