CMAJ urges more Canadian health research amid cuts to U.S. health agencies

A sign stands at an entrance to the main campus of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia, Friday, Feb. 14, 2025. (AP Photo/Jeff Amy)

TORONTO — The Canadian Medical Association Journal is urging Canada to step up its research funding to fill a void expected to be left by deep cuts to health agencies in the United States.

In an editorial published in the CMAJ on Monday, editor-in-chief Kirsten Patrick said it’s also important for medical journals to stand up for science and condemn the erosion of public health surveillance and data collection south of the border.

“Reliable North American health data that originate from Canada are more important than they ever have been,” Patrick wrote.

“Now is the time to fund Canadian health researchers properly and to support them to share their work.”

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has said it is slashing public health funding and staffing at the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health and other agencies.

In an interview, Patrick predicted that will leave a “black hole” as high-quality data and research that Canada and other countries rely on disappears.

“Unless we have really tip-top shape data and we’re really good at sharing them among provinces and internationally, it means that we’re going to be suffering from the consequences of that.”

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is the largest public funder of health research in the world, according to its website.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is responsible for the safety of food, drugs and medical devices and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is responsible for protecting public health, including doing surveillance and responding to infectious disease outbreaks.

Health experts say the deterioration of public health measures and health research in the United States will have enormous global impact, including on Canada.

Dr. Tom Frieden, a former director of the CDC, told a Canadian Medical Association conference on Thursday that it may take time to see the scope of the damage that will be done, but that it will be “really quite substantial.”

“What does that mean for Canada? Well, you may be facing spread of infectious diseases, measles, pertussis, drug-resistant tuberculosis from the U.S.,” he said in a virtual panel presentation.

“You will also be facing spread of infections diseases globally that will increase predictably as a result of these ill-considered changes,” said Frieden, who is now president and CEO of global health agency Resolve to Save Lives.

Angela Rasmussen, a U.S. virologist who has worked at the University of Saskatchewan for the last few years, said she’s particularly worried about what may happen to influenza surveillance given the threat posed by H5N1 avian flu, which has sickened dozens of people in the United States — mostly from contact with infected poultry or cattle — and hospitalized a Canadian teenager in British Columbia.

“If H5N1 does manage to make the leap into being transmitted efficiently from person to person, then our ability to contain that is going to be completely dependent on us catching an early cluster of infection very fast and being able to send people out and contain it,” Rasmussen said.

She said she’s been speaking to many colleagues in the United States who work for or are funded by Health and Human Services agencies on the Signal private messaging app because they’re under a communications ban.

“They’re risking their jobs and their livelihoods if they violate it,” said Rasmussen.

“Many of them are violating it anyways through these secure encrypted channels because they think that we should know what’s going on at these agencies, how it’s affecting them and how it’s actually going to affect public health in general.”

Rasmussen praised the CMAJ for speaking out: “Institutions need to be screaming about this.”

“Canadian journals need to hold the line. They need to establish what our values are and our values are publishing great science and standing up for democracy,” she said.

Patrick said medical journals should be platforms for defending science, including on topics that U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration is trying to control such as gender and race.

“We can’t control what the U.S. is doing to individual researchers. However, we can say, ‘Hey, we’re still here publishing science that looks at the whole picture with our standards for reporting race and ethnicity and reporting gender and all that kind of stuff,” she said.

Rasmussen echoed Patrick’s call for the Canadian government to shore up research in this country.

“It’s not, I think, an exaggeration to say that we’re going to be entering a really profoundly bad time, almost like a modern Dark Age. Canada has the ability, I think, to try to be a little bit of light in the dark,” she said.

Rasmussen urged “whichever party is in power after the election” to “strongly consider increasing their investments in our long-term global health and emergency response capacity.”

“The CDC is broken, the NIH is going to be broken and it’s being dismantled from the inside out. And we’re not going to have the support of my home country and one of our best allies ... anymore. So we need to develop it for ourselves.”

Nicole Ireland, The Canadian Press

With files from The Associated Press