NEWS
  Women want health needs upgraded --- Charge research agency ignoring issues
  Peter Calamai

  06/08/2000
  The Toronto Star
  1
  NE06
  Copyright (c) 2000 The Toronto Star

  OTTAWA - Women's health advocates say the needs of 52 per cent of the population
are shortchanged in a new federal agency set up
  to reform health research in Canada.

  And they say they'll rally political and public pressure to upgrade women's health
issues at the new Canadian Institutes of Health
  Research (CIHR), formally launched here yesterday by Health Minister Allan Rock.

  Women's health is relegated to secondary status in the draft CIHR structure,
operating as a co-ordinating office rather than a separate
  institute that funds its own research. Advocates say this approach is too feeble to
overcome years of research neglect.

  "There are big gaps in our knowledge about some women's health issues and the
dominant research community isn't much interested in
  some of these research areas," said Dr. Penny Ballem, who co-chairs a national
group that has lobbied for a higher priority for
  women's health.

  Ballem pointed out public pressure was needed before researchers paid enough
attention to concerns of sufferers from AIDS and breast
  cancer.

  "Women's health is a very similar issue," said Ballen, a blood specialist in charge
of women's programs at Vancouver's Children and
  Women's Health Centre.

  The reaction from women's health advocates is likely to kick off another round of
intense lobbying of CIHR officials by scientists
  anxious to get a piece of the enlarged research pie. Under the new agency, Ottawa
has promised to double spending on health research
  to $500 million a year by 2002.

  Originally announced in the 1999 federal budget, the Canadian Institutes of Health
Research are supposed to expand health research
  beyond the traditional approach dominated by medicine and the biological sciences.
The CIHR will finance research into health systems
  and services plus investigations of what is known as population health, such as the
impact of poverty and pollution.

  Yet the CIHR governing council membership is dominated by researchers from the
medicine and biological sciences, including the
  president, Dr. Alan Bernstein.

  "The spotlight is now trained on Canada. Everybody is very interested in this
experiment," said Bernstein, who headed the Samuel
  Lunenfeld Research Institute at Mount Sinai Hospital for six years.

  The new agency is considered pioneering because the component will be "virtual"
rather than bricks and mortar buildings. Researchers
  can be located at universities, institutes or hospitals anywhere in the country and
will be overseen by scientific directors similarily
  dispersed outside of Ottawa.

  In addition, the research agenda of each institute is supposed to embrace the
entire spectrum of health, all the way from the lab to the
  community.

  The 10 proposed institutes reflect this revolutionary approach, with cumbersome
names such as Aboriginal and Indigenous People's
  Health or Social, Environmental and Genetic Influences on Heath.

  "The institutes will focus on a problem rather than a scientific discipline," said
Bernstein.

  But the status of women's health research obviously caused serious debate among the
body that produced the blueprint for the CIHR
  structure. It hints the new governing council may want to re-examine this decision.

  Anne Rochon Ford says pressure from women will make sure there is another look.

  "The issues here are complex - it's more than `just add women and stir' to get good
research," said Ford, who co-authored the
  submission from the women's health advocacy group.