The U.S. Senate yesterday followed the lead of the House of Representatives and passed legislation setting up a National Alzheimer’s Project within the Department of Health. The President is expected to sign the bill, which calls for a “War on Alzheimer’s.”
The plan aims to coordinate and augment efforts to develop drugs to delay or treat the disease and to discover means towards earlier diagnosis.
ACSH’s Dr. Elizabeth Whelan says that this “smells a bit like the War on Cancer.” ACSH's Dr. Gilbert Ross observes that “it might prove successful in the way that the Manhattan and Apollo Projects were. We can certainly hope that’s the case.” Of course, says Dr. Whelan, “It will be the pharmaceutical industry, not the government, that will be relied on to do the research.”
One of the House sponsors of the bill, Rep. Edward Markey, quoted in The New York Times, notes that the constituency for the bill is minimized because Alzheimer’s patients are necessarily politically disengaged and their caregivers are busy assisting them.