"Health & Medical News"

The NAACP, National Urban League and other groups called on Congress to end the federal ban on funding needle-exchange programs, saying that the harm-reduction strategy has been proven to prevent HIV/AIDS, the Associated Press reported Feb. 6.

The plea was made in coordination with the Harm Reduction Coalition and in conjunction with National Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day. Federal funding for needle exchanges have been banned for 20 years, although most states fund the programs.

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With a Congressional funding ban finally lifted, the District of Columbia government announced that it will spend $650,000 of local taxpayers’ money to establish needle-exchange programs aimed at cutting HIV/AIDS transmission among drug users, the Washington Post reported Jan. 3.

In its FY2008 budget plan, Congress ended a ban on D.C. using public funds to fund needle exchanges, although a ban on federal funding for the harm-reduction programs remains in place. D.C. Mayor Adrian M. Fenty said the clean-needle programs are needed to help reduce the HIV/AIDS rate in the city, which is among the highest in the nation.

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By Bob Curley

An omnibus federal budget for FY2008 has been passed by the U.S. Senate and House and is headed for the president’s desk; the bill includes funding for addiction treatment and prevention programs as part of $555 billion in appropriations.

The consensus among addiction-field advocates seems to indicate that treatment, prevention and research programs fared reasonably well in another difficult budget year, despite some significant cuts in certain programs.

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By Bob Curley

Performance-based government funding may be the wave of the future, but Congress still isn’t quite ready to base its budgetary decisions on formalized performance measures, as the FY2008 budget process makes clear.

The Senate voted 75-19 on Oct. 23 to approve the budget for the Department of Health and Human Services, Education and Related Agencies, which includes funding for all programs within the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), the National Institute on Health research agencies (the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism), and? the Department of Education’s? Safe and Drug-Free Schools and Communities (SDFS) program.

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The U.S. Sentencing Commission has issued new guidelines that reduce average sentences for crack-cocaine offenses and bring penalties more in line with those meted out to offenders caught selling or possessing powdered cocaine, the New York Times reported Nov. 2.

After years of debate over the sentencing disparity*, the sentencing panel quietly reduced the average crack sentence from 10 years, 1 month to 8 years, 10 months. Congress let a mandatory 180-day review period pass without challenging the commission’s recommendation.

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Washington — Four states joined in a lawsuit and a fifth filed its own to block new rules limiting eligibility for the State Children’s Health Insurance Program.

The group lawsuit, filed Oct. 4 in a federal court in New York, says the Dept. of Health and Human Services should have provided the public notice and comment period required by law for program changes as significant as those in its Aug. 17 guidance.

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Washington — The nation’s public health system is much better positioned to respond to emergencies than it was five years ago, say local administrators. But they fear recent federal funding cuts will undermine their gains.

Officials point to funding increases that arrived in the post-9/11 era as a big reason for the improvements. Events in the fall of 2001 served to highlight the role public health plays in defending the United States, but departments nationwide struggled to meet the challenge and resorted to such tactics as shifting personnel from disease control to contend with anthrax-tainted letters.

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With Rocky Vista University College of Osteopathic Medicine in Parker, Colo., one step closer to becoming the only for-profit, accredited medical school in the United States, it is generating controversy in the medical community.

In August, the Commission on Osteopathic College Accreditation awarded the school provisional accreditation. Once fully accredited, it will join the ranks of 149 public and private medical schools in the U.S. All those institutions are nonprofits.

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