Thank you for John Crewdson’s article (Feb. 6) concerning pediatric AIDS. Crewdson makes two important points about biomedical research. It is underfunded, and funding levels for various diseases have been affected more by perception than reality.
One area that particularly suffers is research for severe mental illnesses-schizophrenia and depression. Schizophrenia strikes 1 percent of the population, and yet our government spends $14 per patient for research; $10 is spent for major depressive disorders. The government spends $130 per patient for heart disease research and $203 for cancer.
We must increase the U.S. biomedical research budget to improve the quality of health care. Significantly more should be spent to find causes, cures and better treatments of severe mental illnesses.
