Studies of Gay Men, Prostitutes Come Under Scrutiny

[vicman]

Full text available at: Kaiser, POLITICS AND BIOMEDICINE: Studies of Gay Men, Prostitutes Come Under Scrutiny, Science 2003 300: 403

This is someting I feel strongly about. Especially as HIV and AIDS infection rates continue to rise among minorities and the heterosexual population of all races/ethnicities.

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Biomedical Politics

Studies of Gay Men, Prostitutes Targeted for Scrutiny

Last month, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) conducted a site visit of an investigator at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) whose studies of sex workers have been the target of a recent inquiry from Congress. Although there is no hard evidence that the inquiry and the site visit are linked, the events have shaken researchers at UCSF and some

in government who worry that the Bush Administration and Congressional Republicans are intensifying their scrutiny of research on sensitive topics.

Program staff at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), for example, have warned grant applicants to cleanse certain terms, such as "transgendered" and "prostitutes," from their grant applications. The reason, according to an NIH staffer who asked not to be identified, is to reduce the projects visibility. "What's frightening" is that NIH staff feel grantees need to disguise their work, says Alfred Sommer, dean of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

HHS spokeperson Bill Pierce denies that the department is targeting research on certain topics. "We do nothing like that," he says. John Burklow, NIH spokeperson, says the site visit was for "administrative issues," not "scientific content," and that there was nothing unusual about it.

The controversy centers on research by AIDS researcher Tooru Nemoto, whose projects include preventing HIV infection in Asian female sex workers and on "transgender" women who plan or have had a sex change operation. HHS officials inquired about Nemoto's research in early January, according to Regis Kelly, UCSF vice chancellor for research. Kelly says Nemoto also had

support from another HHS agency, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). UCSF supplied information to clarify that there was no wrongdoing, Kelly says.

A few weeks after HHSs call, NIH told the university that several agencies planned a site visit to discuss Nemoto's grants. That step was "very unusual," says UCSF grants and contracts manager Joan Kaiser, who says normally such questions are addressed by phone or in correspondence.

In late March, four officials from NIH and SAMHSA spent 2 days at UCSF asking about procedures and going "all over San Francisco" to hear scientific talks by Nemoto, Kaiser says. She says UCSF officials "haven't heard back," but assume the grants were in compliance. UCSF officials thought no more of it until they learned last week about a memo from the House of Representatives to NIH. The 13 March email memo, from staffer Roland Foster of the House Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy and Human Resources chaired by Mark Souder (R-IN), raised concerns

about two NIH-funded studies of sex workers--Nemoto's and another led by a researcher in Miami. The memo, which HHS routinely forwarded to NIH director Elias Zerhouni, argues that by attempting to protect the health of sex workers, the studies "seek to legitimize the commercial sexual exploitation

of women." This runs counter to a February directive from President Bush to reduce international sex trafficking, the letter claims.

Fosters memo asks for detailed information about the two grants, including the names of study section members who approved them and the scores they gave. It also requests information on all NIH studies of prostitutes over the past decade. HHS is now asking the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to list studies it funds of sex workers, a CDC spokesperson

says. Foster says he played "no role" in the UCSF site visit, but is

"interested in what may be found."

NIH program officials who handle grants in these areas are worried about the rumored surveillance. Four staffers contacted by Science declined to be interviewed. But one NIH scientist confirmed that some program staff have been telling grantees to reword grants to avoid terms such as: "abortion," "condom effectiveness," "commercial sex workers," transgendered," and men who have sex with men." Changing words in proposals may not shield researchers from scrutiny, however. On 11 April, Foster fired off another letter to NIH raising questions about a UCSF grant to prevent HIV in gay men and demanded a list of all HIV prevention studies.

--Jocelyn Kaiser

[vicman]

from the NY Times.

Certain Words Can Trip Up AIDS Grants, Scientists Say

>April 18, 2003

>By ERICA GOODE

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.

Bill Pierce, a spokesman for the health and human services department, said the department does not screen grant applications for politically delicate content. He said that when the department singles out grants it is usually to send out a news release about them. But an official at the National Institutes of Health, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said project

officers at the agency, the people who deal with grant applicants and recipients, were telling researchers at meetings and in telephone conversations to avoid so-called sensitive language. But the official added, "You won't find any paper or anything that advises people to do this."

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.

Dr. Sommer said that if researchers feared that federal support for their work might be affected by politics, whether it was true or untrue, it could take a toll. "If people feel intimidated and start clouding the language they use, then your mind starts to get cloudy and the science gets cloudy," he said, adding that the federal financing of medical research had traditionally been free from political influence.

At the National Institutes of Health, for example, grant applications are evaluated and rated by a panel of independent reviewers. The grant application is then given a score.

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."

The titles and abstracts of federally financed grants are available to the public on a computer database maintained by the national institutes. The database, called CRISP, is also frequently read by Congressional staff members on the lookout for research on topics that are of concern to the politicians they work for. Over the years, studies on cloning, abortion, animal rights, needle-exchange programs and various types of AIDS research

have been criticized by members of Congress.

But researchers said they feared that the concerns of individual members of Congress were now being taken more seriously by the health and human services department.

John Burklow, a spokesman for the N.I.H., said project directors at the agency were responsible for "providing advice and guidance on myriad issues related to grant applications," but he did not confirm or deny that the project officers were cautioning researchers about the language they used.

He said that the health and human services department "from a management perspective has a right to oversee N.I.H. affairs" but that department officials "have not interfered with the awarding or renewing of any N.I.H. grant."

[sassa]

dnice? no reply?