Certain Words Can Trip Up AIDS Grants, Scientists Say (NY Times, April 18, 2003, registration required): Scientists who study AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases say they have been warned by federal health officials that their research may come under unusual scrutiny by the Department of Health and Human Services or by members of Congress, because the topics are politically controversial. The scientists, who spoke on condition they not be identified, say they have been advised they can avoid unfavorable attention by keeping certain "key words" out of their applications for grants from the National Institutes of Health or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Those words include "sex workers," "men who sleep with men," "anal sex" and "needle exchange," the scientists said. [...] The official said researchers had long been advised to avoid phrases that might mark their work as controversial. But the degree of scrutiny under the Bush administration was "much worse and more intense," the official said. Dr. Alfred Sommer, the dean of the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University, said a researcher at his institution had been advised by a project officer at N.I.H. to change the term "sex worker" to something more euphemistic in a grant proposal for a study of H.I.V. prevention among prostitutes. He said the idea that grants might be subject to political surveillance was creating a "pernicious sense of insecurity" among researchers. [...] In another example of the scrutiny the scientists described, a researcher at the University of California said he had been advised by an N.I.H. project officer that the abstract of a grant application he was submitting "should be `cleansed' and should not contain any contentious wording like `gay' or `homosexual' or `transgender.' " The researcher said the project officer told him that grants that included those words were "being screened out and targeted for more intense scrutiny." He said he was now struggling with how to write the grant proposal, which dealt with a study of gay men and H.I.V. testing. When the subjects were gay men, he said, "It's hard not to mention them in your abstract."
So.
Apparently the administration (and, to some extent, conservative members of Congress) now does not want the groups which have traditionally been most at risk for these diseases to actually be studied.
Well.
How very very special of them.
This is, of course, part and parcel of the administration's documented approach to health care information. The CDC's site was cleansed of controversial information, and the dance the administration forced on the CDC about the connection (or pronounced lack thereof) between abortion and breast cancer was simply unspeakable. More recently, when SARS first broke out, CDC doctors said, almost immediately, that it wasn't a result of terrorism. Then, oddly, when asked that question a couple of weeks later, they hemmed and hawed and said that they weren't sure. It is, of course, entirely possible that the CDC decided that it wouldn't be prudent to commit themselves until more information was available. Given past practice, it is far more likely that the administration demanded that they stop saying that SARS wasn't terrorism related for political reasons; after all, they've been trumpeting the dangers of biological agents for nearly two years now, and yet we haven't seen one single such use. (This is most emphatically NOT to say that it isn't possible; only that it's very difficult to keep people afraid of an event when it resolutely fails to happen.)
And now the administration is requiring researchers to avoid mentioning certain terms, because they will refuse to fund such grants. To be sure, the administration, in one sense, has a right to restrict how its funds are spent. But in another ... one would think that their responsibility to the public health of this country would make them simply fund those projects which will best contribute to that.
One would, quite apparently, be wrong.
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