Stimulus Benefits Child Programs
Vaccine programs, child day care, and Head Start all will benefit from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act economic stimulus package, the Obama administration said. As part of the stimulus package, the federal government will use $300 million to promote immunization, purchase vaccines, and distribute them through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's immunization program. In addition, states will receive $2 billion from the stimulus package to pay for day care and expand facilities providing it. And the Head Start and Early Head Start programs will gain access to $2.1 billion grants that could expand coverage to more than 70,000 children, infants, pregnant women, and their families. Head Start will receive a separate $235 million increase in funding for 2009 through the stimulus package, the Obama administration said.
$60 Million to Autism Research
The National Institutes of Health said it will commit roughly $60 million in stimulus package funds to support autism research over the next 2 years.
Four grant programs collectively known as “Research to Address the Heterogeneity in Autism Spectrum Disorders” will fund research to develop and test diagnostic screening tools, assess risks from prenatal or early life exposures to potential toxins, conduct clinical trials, and adapt existing interventions to a maturing population of people with autism-spectrum disorders.
The topics follow the strategic plan that came from the federal Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee, NIH said.
AAP, AAFP Want Case Overturned
The American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Academy of Family Physicians have urged the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn a Georgia high court decision that could allow parents of autistic children to sue vaccine manufacturers.
Last October, the Georgia Supreme Court ruled that the case, which involves an autistic child who stopped speaking after being vaccinated, could go to trial. However, other state and federal courts have held that the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Compensation Act of 1986 preempts such lawsuits, and the U.S. Supreme Court is considering whether to take the Georgia case.
“If this [Georgia] decision is allowed to stand, it could lead to the very same crisis that Congress sought to prevent in passing the original legislation,” said Stephan Lawton, an attorney for AAP, in a statement.
“There is a genuine threat to our nation's public health if manufacturers abandon or consider abandoning the production of vaccines. [A decision to permit vaccine suits] would set our country back decades and have deadly consequences for our children.”
House Passes Wakefield Act
The House has passed, 390-1, the Wakefield Act to reauthorize the Emergency Medical Services for Children program. The bill now goes to the Senate for consideration.
In the past 25 years, the program has funded state emergency services offices and supported projects that bolster children's emergency care. “It is no coincidence that since the EMSC program was established, death rates due to pediatric injury have dropped by an astounding 40%,” AAP President David Tayloe said in a statement.
The legislation, named for a family whose child survived a catastrophic auto accident because of excellent emergency care, would reauthorize the program for 5 more years.