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By Dianna Thompson and Glenn Sacks
Congress is sending a message to American men: men's health doesn't count.
The disturbing health and mortality disparities between American whites and blacks are
well known, but most people do not realize that the health and mortality disparities
between women and men are just as great. For example, the gap in life expectancy
between whites and blacks is six years, while the gender gap is 5.7 years. Adjusted for
age, men are 1.6 times as likely as women to die from one of the top 10 causes of
death, and blacks are 1.5 times as likely to die from them as whites.
Despite this, it is women's health, not men's, which continues to receive government
attention and funding. For example, the National Institutes of Health--the federal focal
point for medical research in the U.S.--spends nearly four times as much on femalespecific
health research as on male-specific research. And though the average man is
as likely to die from prostate cancer as the average woman is from breast cancer, the
Department of Health and Human Services' National Cancer Institute spends three and
a half times as much money on breast cancer research as on prostate cancer research.
In fact, prostate cancer makes up 37% of all cancer cases but receives only 5% of
federal research funding. In addition, the breast cancer postage stamp has raised over
$25 million for breast cancer research since it began in 1998, while a 1999 bill
proposing a similar stamp for prostate cancer research was unsuccessful.
When Congress formed the Office on Women's Health in 1991, its goal was to improve
women's health by directing and coordinating women's health research, health care
services, and health education. Since then men's health advocates have been trying to
create an Office of Men's Health, with the goal of duplicating the OWH's success. Yet
while a new bill which will help to make the OWH's funding permanent was just passed
by the House, the Men's Health Act of 2001 (H.R. 632) remains trapped in the House
Energy and Commerce Committee's subcommittee on health. If not rescued soon, the
bill will die when the 107th Congress adjourns this fall.
According to Tracie Snitker, director of public affairs for the Men's Health Network, "the
number and quality of federally funded women's health education projects is
outstanding. But while outreach programs teach women about breast cancer and
cervical cancer, there are few if any programs which educate men about their own
gender-specific health needs.
"We want to do for men what the OWH has done for women," she adds. "Men need
education about the cancers which disproportionately affect them, such as prostate
cancer, skin cancer and colorectal cancer. Young men need education on testicular
cancer. Most importantly, we need to teach men to seek preventative health care."
Part of the reason an Office of Men's Health has been so long in coming is the common
but nonetheless false perception that the government and the scientific community have
paid more attention to men's health than to women's. In 1990 Senator Barbara Mikulski
(D-MD) made national headlines by citing the fact that women-specific health research
comprised only 14% of the budget of the National Institute of Health (NIH). She called it
"blatant discrimination" and led the successful campaign for the creation of the OWH.
What Mikulski and many in the media who publicized Mikulski's claims did not
understand was that only 6.5% of the NIH's budget went to male-specific research--the
vast majority of the NIH's research was gender neutral.
Today the disparity in favor of women in NIH research has grown, as has the gender
disparity in enrollments in non-gender-specific studies. According to the Government
Accounting Office, one of the few areas where men comprise the majority of research
subjects is in initial trials of experimental drugs. These are the trials undertaken to
ensure that the drugs are not lethal or seriously harmful.
First, drugs are usually tested on rats and monkeys. If there are no adverse effects, they
are then tested on people--usually men. If the men also show no adverse effects, the
drugs advance to larger trials, where women comprise the majority.
Considering Congress' repeated refusal to act to help men's health, one can't help but
wonder--is men's health as important as women's, or is it merely more important than
monkeys'?
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