WASHINGTON, D.C. January 15, 2014 The U.S. House of Representatives is scheduled to vote today on a bipartisan FY14 budget that prioritizes proven cancer prevention programs at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and begins to restore funding for critical cancer research at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Increasing funding for the Office of Smoking and Health at the CDC over pre-sequester levels and restoring funding for breast, cervical and colorectal cancer screenings offered to uninsured and underinsured individuals will help to remove barriers to proven prevention programs.æ Access to prevention will help ensure that cancer can be detected earlier when patient outcomes are better and the disease is less expensive to treat or, in some cases, be prevented altogether through critical education and tobacco cessation.
The additional $1 billion included in the bill to partially restore funding at the NIH for cancer research and other diseases cut through sequestration is an important step in the right direction, providing hope for cancer patients and their loved ones who anxiously await new discoveries that could lead to treatments that target their individual disease. Sustained and robust funding is imperative to allow scientists to maximize the scope of their research and promote progress for the more than 1.6 million Americans who will be newly diagnosed with cancer this year.
We are also hopeful that increased funding for the Food and Drug Administration will improve resources to address recent drug shortages and speed the approval of promising new treatments and therapies.
We are encouraged by the bipartisan support shown in this bill for programs essential to the fight against cancer.æ As Members of Congress prepare to shift gears and begin to work on the FY15 budget, families affected by cancer urge lawmakers to fully restore and sustain funding for cancer research and prevention in a way that will increase the number of patients enrolled in clinical trials, support researchers on the cusp of promising discovery and leverage the nation 's past investment all toward the goal ofæ maximizing our potential to eliminate death and suffering from a disease that still kills 1,500 Americans every day.
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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