GOP Mission Accomplished: Shutdown Blocks Kids With Cancer From Clinical Trials
By Sydney Lupkin
Oct 1, 2013 12:29pm
For every week that the government shutdown continues, 10 children with cancer will not be able to begin their clinical trials, officials told ABCNews.com.
John Burklow, a spokesman for the National Institutes of Health, estimated that 200 patients would experience these delays each week of the shutdown. Since 15 percent of these patients are typically children, and 33 percent of these children have cancer, that means the patients facing delays would include about 30 children per week, 10 of whom have cancer, he said.
Federal health programs are down thousands of employees, which hampers clinical trials and disease outbreak surveillance.
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As a result of the shutdown, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has furloughed 9,000 employees, rendering it unable to track multi-state disease outbreaks, said CDC spokeswoman Barbara Reynolds. These currently include the disease stemming from the brain-eating amoeba Naegleria fowleri, which killed a 4-year-old in Louisiana a few weeks ago, and the stomach bug cyclospora, which has sickened 643 people in 25 states since June.
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/health/2013/10/01/federal-shutdown-to-hamper-disease-tracking-clinical-trials/
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