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Here's a quote from the article:
"Connie Morella (R-Md.) say there's no need for a men's office because federal health research and policy already focus disproportionately on men. "
Yep. That's my "Representative" all right. I wrote to her last year and requested that she support an office for mens health and she wrote back claiming that women were really the ones in need....I will paste in her response for anyone interested to read her disinterest in men's needs.
Anyone wanting to contact Representative Morella could do so by emailing rep.morella@mail.house.gov
Here's her first response to my request that she support an office for Men's Health (any spelling errors in her response are likely mine):
Dear Mr Golden:
Thank you for contacting me to express your support for an Office of Men's Health at the Department of Health and Human Services.
Health care for all Americans regardless of gender, race or age must be our primary focus. However, the fact that nearly 180,000 men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer does merit very serious attention. Because of this I have and will continue to support all legislative initiatives calling for early screening, testing and treatment fo this disease. Unfortunately, the trematnet for prostate cancer also perdisposes men to osteoporosis. Therefore, I have introduced legislation, H.R. 595 which will bring greater parity to the Medicare program by extending bone density screening to men.
Osteoporosis affects more than five million men in the United States. Prevention is as simple and cost-effective as bone density screening test that costs less than $200. Early detection is a key component in containing the human and economic cost of this disease.
You may be interested to know the reason for the establishment of the Office of Women's Health. Just ten years ago a General Accounting Office study reported that women had routinely been excluded from many studies, such as the Physicians Health Study which studied the effects of aspirin on heart disease on 22,000 male physicians. Another study, the Multiple Risk Factor Inventory Trial, a fifteen year project studying the risk factors for cardiovascular disease, included 13,000 and no women. Because of this the Women's Health Equity Act was passed which included the establishment of an Office of Research on Women's Health and the requirement that women and minorities be included wherever appropriate in research studies funded by NIH.
I hope this information is of interest to you and can assure you of my ongoing support for improved health care for all Americans.
Sincerely, Connie Morella
member of congress
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Barf! This is called no response. So I whipped off my second note which was a tad stronger than the first..... :) This woman needs to step down and allow someone to represent her constituency who cares for all of us, not just the women! Believe me, I will be working to sink her this fall.
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by Anonymous User on Sunday January 20, @08:14PM EST (#2)
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I sent her this note.
Marc
______________
Dear Connie Morella,
You are very wrong when you say that women were
disproportionately represented in clinical trials and in health spending. The GAO report you refer to did not say that at all, as Dr. Ed Bartlett of Men's Health America recently demonstrated. I wrote the article below in the UCLA newspaper. I think you should read it.
Please stop spreading myths.
Marc Angelucci
____________________
US GOVERNMENT BREAKS ITS PROMISE OF GENDER EQUALITY
MEN: Female health care receives precedence, more funding than male needs
--------------------------------------------------
http://www.dailybruin.ucla.edu/db/articles.asp?ID= 2307
By Marc Angelucci
As we break our new year resolutions regarding our health long before Superbowl Sunday, it sometimes helps to know others are also breaking them with regard to their own health. But did you know the U.S. government routinely breaks its own commitment to your health, especially if you're a male?
Men in the United States live an average of six years less than women and have a higher death rate for each of the top 10 leading causes of death. They are twice as likely as women to be receiving no regular health care (23.2 percent
vs. 11.9 percent, respectively), and men under 65 are less likely than women to even have health insurance with which they can receive such care, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Yet, the National Institute of Health has ismally failed to live up to its commitment to gender equality in health funding that it made in the Revitalization Act of 1993. Why? Because of feminist-driven demands to remedy years of
illusory inequalities.
For example, in 1990, the Congressional Women's Caucus went wild over a report showing that under 14 percent of NIH funds went to female-specific illnesses, even though only 7 percent of the funds went to male-specific illnesses.
NIH caved in, forming an Office of Women's Health without an equivalent Office of Men's Health, and claimed it was "in response to a report by the U.S. General Accounting Office ... that women were routinely excluded from medical research supported by the NIH."
A review of the GAO report reveals no such statement, other than an anecdotal example of an all-male study and a subsequent conclusion that there is no readily-accessible data on NIH study demographics. In fact, Dr. Sally Satel of
Yale University, national syndicate Cathy Young, and others have recently shown this claim to be false. Even the prestigious Institute of Medicine recently admitted that the "literature is inconclusive about whether women have been excluded or importantly underrepresneted in
clinical trials," (New England Journal of Medicine, 1999; 341).
Yet politicians still make this false claim to justify the systematic neglect of men's health, a neglect that is harming more and more men and their loved ones every year.
In 1999, female-specific health received 15.5 percent of NIH funds while male-specific health received 6.4 percent. Only 37.1 percent of participants in extramural research were men (down from 45 percent in 1994), and NIH had 740
female-only studies but only 244 male-only studies in progress, according to the General Accounting Office.
The claim that women were significantly underrepresented can be debunked with a simple search using Medline, the best-known database for published medical research (http://igm.nlm.nih.gov/). A search of the period 1966-1990 for clinical trials (a more rigorous type of research than case reports) on leading causes of death and other conditions commonly researched at NIH (for which at least five trials are reported) shows that 753 trials included
men and 854 included women. Of the diseases that commonly affect both sexes, the only ones with a significantly higher number of male subjects
were heart attacks (59 men, 37 women) and heart disease (137 men, 78 women). As Dr. Ed Bartlett of Men's Health America explains, it makes scientific sense to first study a population that is more commonly affected, and men under 65 are three times more likely to have heart attacks than women.
In fact, during the same period, men were underrepresented as subjects in cancer-related trials, even though they suffer from cancer at higher rates than women (Boston Globe, Nov. 15, 2000).
The Medline search showing equal representation is supported by other data as well. For example, of the 293 clinical studies in the 1979 NIH Inventory of Clinical Trials, 91 percent included both men and women, while the rest consisted of 12 male-only and 12 female-only studies. (Women and Health Research, Vol. I, 1994). But as activists began claiming women were underrepresented, things worsened for men, and by 1997, there were 203 women-only studies but
only 90 men-only studies. (Applied Clinical Trials 1997; 6).
These are not strictly examining female-only conditions. A list of the 1997 studies reveals hundreds of female-only studies on things commonly affecting men, such as AIDS, cancer prevention, chronic lung disease and Alzheimer's.
But the anti-male bias is most blaring when it comes to prostate and breast cancer. While the yearly diagnoses and deaths are about equal, the National Cancer Institute spent $92.7 million on breast cancer but only $13.8 million on prostate research in 1991. Then, by 1999, breast cancer
funds jumped to $366 million while prostate cancer remained at a measly $96 million
(www.nci.nih.gov/public/factbk97/varican.htm).
It gets worse. A September 1997 report in Men's Health shows the Department of Defense spent $455 million on breast cancer but only $20 million on prostate cancer. And, according to the American Foundation of Urologic Disease, the government overall spends $3,000 per breast cancer diagnosis and $12,000 per death in the U.S. (men make 1
percent of patients) while only spending $250 per prostate cancer diagnosis and $2,000 per death.
This is not, as some claim, a remediation of past bias. From 1981 to 1991 (before nationwide breast cancer activism), NCI spent $658 million on breast cancer but only $113 million on prostate cancer.
How do they get away with these lies and hurt so many men and their loved ones? As national syndicate Cathy Young points out, the failure of men and women to speak up against anti-male bias and distortions about health care inequalities (and other issues) gave activists a "free
ride" in the media for years.
What can you do? Write your reps and support the Men's Health Act (SB 2925), which will create a badly-needed Office of Men's Health. Demand that UCLA offer men's studies courses, like that taught by Dr. Martin Fiebert at Cal State Long Beach, to help men learn about themselves
apart from role-enforcing history books and feminist distortions about them. Read Warren Farrell (warrenfarrell.com), and keep informed with frequent visits to www.mensactivism.org.
Meanwhile, don't follow our government's example –fulfill your resolutions. Make your amends. Eat your veggies. And be sure to rinse them down with some good Chianti. To your health, of course.
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Many thanks Mark. Great article. I hope she reads it. It's great to know that others are emailing her. She could sure use a little masculine sensitivity training ;>)
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Don't you know that Connie Morella is
a hardcore anti-male feminist?
Read about her here:
http://www.menmedia.org/online/1/261.htm
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