When reports of lavish spending of taxpayer dollars on food, hotels and entertainment by Government Services Administration employees at conferences surfaced in April 2012, the public and Congress reacted swiftly and negatively.
We all found this behavior unacceptable, especially during a time of economic crisis and hardship for so many Americans. However, the overreaction has now reached the level of the theater of the absurd.
New Defense Department polices have led to one-size-fits-all restrictions aimed at limiting all expenditures to prevent any possibility of bad publicity. This dangerous overreaction will prevent medical and scientific professionals from attending their professional society meetings and ultimately may place American service members in harm’s way — vulnerable not to foreign troops but to infectious diseases.
For the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research and the Naval Medical Research Center, in particular, this decision is devastating.
For more than a century, the WRAIR, the NMRC and their overseas laboratories have been conducting research on tropical and infectious diseases. Their work has led to increased understanding and treatments, vaccines, diagnostics and preventive measures for yellow fever, malaria, dengue fever, hepatitis A, meningococcal meningitis, dysentery, typhoid, cholera, syphilis and many other diseases, as well as new protocols such as the use of chlorination to disinfect drinking water.
These advances would have been impossible without the opportunity for DOD researchers such as ourselves to collaborate with experts in their fields at national and international scientific conferences.
The U.S. military has been a leader in research and development for tropical infectious diseases for more than a century primarily because of the devastating effect these diseases have had on operational readiness and mission effectiveness.
During World War II and the Vietnam War there were more than 12 million and 1 million troop days lost, respectively, because of malaria — missions were undermined or aborted because of malaria and our military personnel died of malaria. Our troops continue to be at risk for malaria, dengue fever, diarrheal diseases and many other well-known and emerging infections in the theaters where they are deployed. Soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan have been at risk for contracting leishmaniasis, a parasitic infection transmitted by the bites of sand flies that leads to difficult to treat chronic skin ulcers. Many of these diseases continue to affect soldiers long after they return home, and we must continue to develop new ways of protecting them.
For Army and Navy biomedical scientists, attendance at professional scientific conferences, such as that of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, is not to be confused with a travel perk or a taxpayer-funded outing masquerading as a scientific gathering.
It is the single-largest international opportunity in tropical medicine research for the military’s scientists to have meaningful, face-to-face interactions with leading infectious disease experts from academia, the National Institutes of Health, the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention, nongovernmental organizations, international governments and corporate partners from around the world.
It’s an opportunity to discuss data and research protocols and brainstorm in real time. It provides a springboard for national and international cooperation that can move promising treatments from laboratories to clinics worldwide. These meetings, more akin to classrooms, also help further the education of our scientists, particularly early-career investigators who we need to stay in the field if we are to be serious about retaining U.S. leadership in science and innovation.
Lois Lerner, director of exempt organizations for the IRS, arrives for a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing on the investigation of the IRS' targeting of political groups. Lerner invoked her Fifth Amendment right to not testify and caused a protest from some committee members when she offered an opening statement and engaged in dialogue with members before invoking the right.
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