The Legislature finds and declares all of the following:
(a) The National Institutes of Health (NIH), the nation’s major source of funding for medical research conducted in the United States, spends approximately 13 percent of its budget for research on conditions and diseases that are primarily women’s health issues. Although it is true that the great majority of the NIH research funds are expended for studies of diseases that affect both men and women, or for fundamental research that has significance for diseases affecting all segments of our population, women have not been adequately represented in research populations in major NIH-funded studies of diseases which affect both men and women.
(b) Today many medical treatments currently used on women are based on studies conducted entirely on men. For example, although cardiovascular illness is the number one cause of death and disability in American women, women have consistently been excluded from major research studies in this area.
(c) It is estimated that 175,000 American women will develop breast cancer, and 44,000 women will die from the disease this year. Currently, one in nine women born in the United States will develop breast cancer in her lifetime.
(d) Women constitute 11 percent of all reported AIDS cases. Eighty percent of all HIV-infected women are women of color.
(e) Osteoporosis, a condition characterized by excessive loss of bone tissue, affects an estimated 24 million Americans and results annually in an estimated $10 billion in direct medical costs. The cost of this disease will continue to escalate as the population ages and the incidence of osteoporosis increases. If current trends continue, the cost of osteoporosis treatment could be as much as $62 billion by the year 2020.
(f) Eighty percent of individuals affected by osteoporosis are women. One-half of all women over age 45 years, and 90 percent of all women over age 75 years, suffer from osteoporosis.
(g) Nearly one million couples seek medical advice or treatment for infertility. In the last 20 years, the number of infertility-related visits to doctors has nearly quadrupled. The risk of infertility is one and one-half times greater for blacks than for whites.
(h) Despite these facts, women’s health issues—which are defined as diseases or conditions that are unique to women, are more prevalent or more serious in women, or for which specific risk factors or interventions differ for women—have received insufficient attention both in terms of funding and research.
(i) The best way to treat women’s health problems is to prevent them from occurring, or to catch them in their earliest stages when they are most treatable. Without research into the causes and cures of diseases affecting women, these diseases cannot be effectively treated.
(j) On August 24, 1990, the NIH published a revised, strengthened “NIH/ADHMA Policy Concerning Inclusion of Women in Study Populations.” That policy clearly stated that adequate numbers of women must be included in NIH-funded clinical studies, in proportion to the prevalence of the condition under study, unless an appropriate justification is provided. The revised policy also states that NIH will not fund grants that do not comply with its provisions.
(k) The majority of biomedical research funded by, or based at, the University of California is fundamental research that investigates basic life processes and disease mechanisms, often at the cellular or molecular level, and that yields benefits for all segments of our population.
(Added by Stats. 1991, Ch. 792, Sec. 1.)
Last modified: October 25, 2018