United States – President Joe Biden will likely sign an executive order on Monday intended to advance research on women’s health by strengthening data collection and providing better and more easily available funding for biomedical research.
A Long-standing Disparity
Women comprise one-half of the population, but their health is generally underfunded and underrated. It wasn’t until the nineties that the federal government made women considered in medically funded research. The majority of medical research has been based on men throughout medical history.
The research of today, too frequently, does not adequately monitor any possible sex discrepancies, and women are often underrepresented, especially for illnesses more commonly found in women. Biden’s executive order which is seeking to change that according to White House aides.
“We still know too little about how to effectively prevent, diagnose, and treat a wide array of health conditions in women,” said Dr. Carolyn Mazure, the head of the White House initiative on women’s health.
Empowering Women Through Research
Biden demonstrated his longtime belief in the “power of research” by helping save lives and providing high-quality health care. Although the executive order can be viewed as an integral political instrument in an election year when women will be a major constituency for his reelection, it also represents a glaring violation of accepted norms and standards in electoral politics. First Lady Jill Biden is conveying the message of energizing and pushing female voters through women’s health research as the White House Initiative.
The announcement, though, comes along with the waves that spread from the Supreme Court’s ruling that federal abortion rights were reversed so as to give rise to issues related to pregnancy termination, even for women who never wanted to end their pregnancies. In Alabama, specifically, the IVF had to be reconsidered statewide after a judge’s ruling in the jurisdiction.
Women accounted for the coalition that got Biden elected in 2020, with him having 55% of their votes cast, as reported by AP VoteCast. The AP survey of more than 110,000 voters in 2016’s election shows that the black women and suburban women were the pillars of the Biden’s coalition, while Trump had a small advantage among white women and a very huge percentage of white women with no college degree.
The National Institutes of Health is already hard at work in their new effort on menopause and the treatment of menopausal symptoms and aims to identify the research gaps and then work on them, said the White House adviser Jennifer Klein.
Biden and Jill Biden, the first lady, will likely cover the planned measures at a Women’s History Month reception to be held on Monday in the White House.
Building on Existing Efforts
NIH finances the majority of biomedical research, indispensable for the study of how drugs operate on the human body and for the determination of the appropriate doses in the end.
The symptoms of certain diseases may differ between women and men, such as in the case of heart disease. The other forms that are common in women are Alzheimer’s disease, which is more common in women, and others are unique to women, like endometriosis, uterine cancers, and fibroids found in the uterus. The entire gamut of the experience is there to be dissected; Mazure explained.
Commitment to Funding
Lastly, biased research and unbalanced research may also lead to severe issues; the 2020 research of the University of Chicago and University of California, Berkeley discovered that women unexpectedly were overdosed and got negative impacts from common medication because most of the dosage trials were on men, as reported by The Associated Press.
A hundred million dollars for women health was announced as first lady, last month.