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The Journal of the Canadian Medical Association urges Canada to strengthen its research funding to fill the gap expected to be cut in depth by U.S. health agencies.
In an editorial published on Monday at CMAJ, editor-in-chief Kirsten Patrick said the host of the medical journal is to stand up and condemn science and condemn the erosion of public health surveillance and data collection south of the border.
“Reliable North American health data originating in Canada is more important than ever,” Patrick wrote.
“It’s time to properly fund Canadian health researchers and support them in sharing their work.”
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said it is cutting public health funding and staffing from the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health and other agencies.
Patrick predicted in an interview that this would leave a “black hole” as high-quality data and research that Canada and other countries rely on are gone.
“Unless we really have data on cutting-edge shapes and we are really good at sharing them in provinces and internationally, that means we will suffer from this consequence.”
According to its website, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is the world’s largest public funder for health research.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is responsible for the safety of food, drugs and medical equipment, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is responsible for protecting public health, including monitoring and responding to infection outbreaks.
Health experts say the deterioration in U.S. public health measures and health research will have a huge impact on the global level, including Canada.
Former CDC director Dr. Tom Frieden said Thursday at a meeting of the Canadian Medical Association that it may take some time to see the scope of the damage that will be done, but that will be “really large.”
“What does this mean for Canada? Well, you may be facing the spread of infectious diseases, measles, whooping cough, drug-resistant tuberculosis,” he said in a virtual panel demonstration.
“You will also face the spread of infected diseases around the world, which will be predicted by these inadequate changes,” Frieden said.
Angela Rasmussen, a US virologist who has worked at the University of Saskatchewan for the last few years, said she’s particularly worried about what may happen to influenza surveillance given the threat posed by H5N1 avian flu, which has sickened dozens of people in the United States — mostly from contact with infected poultry or cattle — and hospitalized a Canadian teenager in British Columbia.
“If H5N1 does manage to spread the leap effectively from one person to one person, then the ability we can accommodate will be entirely dependent on the early infection we are infected very quickly and able to send people out and curb it,” Rasmussen said.
She said she has been talking to many colleagues in the U.S. who fund health and public service agencies on the Signal Private Message App because they comply with the communications ban.
“If job violations, they risk their jobs,” Rasmussen said.
“Many of them violated it anyway through these secure crypto channels because they think we should know what’s going on in these agencies, how it affects them and how it actually will affect public health.”
Rasmussen praised CMAJ for speaking out: “The agency needs to scream about it.”
“Canadian journals need to hold this line. They need to determine what our values are, our values are publishing great science and working for democracy,” she said.
Patrick said medical journals should be a platform for defending science, including topics such as U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration’s attempt to control gender and race.
“We have no control over what the U.S. does to individual researchers. But we can say, ‘Hey, we’re still publishing science here, studying the whole situation by the standards of our reporting competitions and race, and reporting on gender and all that stuff.”
Rasmussen echoed Patrick’s call on the Canadian government to conduct research in the country.
She said: “I think it’s almost like a modern dark age to say we’re going to be in a really bad time.
Rasmussen urged “regardless of which party is in power after the election” to “strongly consider increasing their investment in our long-term global health and emergency response capabilities.”
“The CDC is broken, the NIH will be broken and is being removed from the inside out. And, we will no longer have the support of my homeland and one of our best allies. So we need to develop it for ourselves.”
– Documents with the Associated Press
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