Barbara Mikulski: “I rise to join Senator Snowe and Senator Harkin to introduce the Women's Health Office Act of 2001. I am pleased to…”

“I rise to join Senator Snowe and Senator Harkin to introduce the Women's Health Office Act of 2001. I am pleased to introduce this bill with my colleagues because it establishes an important framework to address women's health within the Department of Health and Human Services, HHS. Historically, women's health needs have been ignored or inadequately addressed by the medical establishment and the government. A 1990 General Accounting Office, GAO, report stated that: the National Institutes of Health, NIH, had made little progress in implementing its own inclusion policy on women's participation in clinical trials, NIH inconsistently applied this policy, and NIH had done little to implement analysis of research findings by gender. This was unacceptable. Women make up half or more of the population and must be adequately included in clinical research. That's why I fought to establish the Office of Research on Women's Health, ORWH, at the NIH 11 years ago. We needed to ensure that women were included in clinical research, so that we would know how treatments for a particular disease or condition would affect women.”