WASHINGTON – U.S. Reps. Joe Barton, R-Texas, ranking member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and Greg Walden, R-Ore., ranking member of the committee’s Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee, this week wrote to Dr. Francis S. Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, questioning some of the grants that NIH has funded.

Congress appropriates between $25 and 30 billion a year each year to the NIH. While funding for NIH has remained steady, the number of grant requests has increased in the past few years. In 2004, 24.6 percent of grant applications submitted to NIH received funding. By 2008, that number had shrunk to 21.8 percent.

With that in mind, Barton and Walden are puzzled by  some of the grants that were approved: “Impact of Dragon Boat Racing on Cancer Survivorship”; “Substance Use and HIV Risk Among Thai Women”; “The Healing of the Canoe”; “Patterns of Drug Use and Abuse in the Brazilian Rave Culture”.

“We do not doubt that there may be some degree of scientific benefit to be gained from these studies,” Barton and Walden wrote. “However, given the number of urgent public health issues facing the NIH, such as cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and pandemic disease, we question how peer review panels determined these projects to have ‘high scientific caliber’ and how they are particularly relevant to the NIH Institute and Center research priorities.”

A copy of the letter can be found here.

For the Fox News piece on the NIH grants, click here.