NIH Funding

A fervent non-reader of this blog brought up the concern that the NIH may be receiving funding from private sources, clouding their objectivity.  This appears not to be the case however, as the NIH gets one-hundred percent of its funding from the feds: "The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is an agency of the United States Department of Health and Human Services and is the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical research."

Now looking over at the actual breakdown of how it has spent its money over the past few years reveals some oddities.  Here are some examples:

Item                            2003 (in millions)                     2008 (in millions)             Percentage change

• Alzheimer's Disease        658                                     642                        -3%    
• American Indians           108                                     152                          +40%
• Childhood Leukemia       70                                       53                           -25%
• Global Warming              0                                        58                           +infinity
• Lung Cancer                  296                                     265                         -11%

Well...I really don't have much analysis on this subject other than to dump all reasoning into the waste bag of politics - surely it's not due to any real or perceived incidence/prevalence disease fluctuations.  Perhaps it's the Bush administration's priorities and budgeting battles trying to get more money into the war-chest and the general 'privatization' milieu.  Perhaps this just occurs in a large bureaucracy with rampant infighting.  Or perhaps it's part of the internal struggle going on in the NIH, well documented in this editorial by David Resnick in 2005, where the nexus of public/private necessity tangles with the ethics of government employees being 'funded' by private entities.