Congressional Update
October 7, 2008

The House of Representatives adjourned on Friday, October 3rd and is currently set to reconvene on January 3rd, 2009 for the 111th Congress. The Senate plans to reconvene for a short period of time on November 17th, 2008, following the election on November 4th, 2008.

EXCITING NEWS: First ever substantive pancreatic cancer legislation introduced!
U.S. Representatives Anna Eshoo (D-CA) and Ginny Brown-Waite (R-FL) introduced H.R. 7045, the National Plan to Advance Pancreatic Cancer Research Act, on September 24, 2008. While Congress has passed legislation recognizing our awareness efforts for many years (otherwise known as the Proclamation – read more below), this is the first time that substantive legislation has been introduced to address the problems faced by our scientific research community. To read the text of this bill, please visit www.congress.gov and type in "HR 7045", or click here to see a summary of the bill.

The Pancreatic Cancer Action Network has been working with Reps. Eshoo and Brown-Waite to draft this bill, which is based on the National Plan to Advance Pancreatic Cancer Research. The National Plan was developed by our Scientific Advisory Board and launched to Congress with Dr. Randy Pausch in January 2008. Please click here to sign our online petition voicing your support for this historic legislation and your appreciation for the efforts of Reps. Eshoo and Brown-Waite.

While the introduction of this bill is an important step, we still have a lot of work to do to get this legislation passed and signed into law. While the House of Representatives has likely adjourned for the calendar year, we will be re-introducing it when the new Congress convenes in January 2009. Our work then will be to generate “co-sponsors” (supporters) for the bill among the U.S. House of Representatives. To get started today, please click here to visit our Take Action page and complete our Action Alert which informs members of Congress of this new piece of legislation, encourages them to become familiar with it over the break, and to co-sponsor the bill once it has been re-introduced in the 111th Congress. To see the press release that we issued on the bill introduction, click here.

The 2008 November Awareness Month proclamation (H.Res. 1328)
Thanks to the thousands of messages sent to U.S. Representatives by volunteers like you, we received 88 co-sponsors, a record high, for the resolution recognizing November 2008 as National Pancreatic Cancer Awareness Month. We now have a large support base of Representatives with whom we can work on our upcoming efforts, most notably the National Plan to Advance Pancreatic Cancer Research Act mentioned above. So again, THANK YOU to all of you who completed those Action Alerts!

Supplemental funding to the National Cancer Institute
The Pancreatic Cancer Action Network joined our colleagues in the cancer community to advocate that Congress add additional funds for cancer research to the current fiscal year budget – a much needed effort as the National Cancer Institute and National Institutes of Health have been funded at the same rate for the past several years. We are very pleased to report that Congress passed a bill this summer that provides an additional $20 million to the National Cancer Institute for the Fiscal Year 2008. While $20 million may not go as far as we’d like it to, this legislation was much-needed. The House and Senate later considered several other supplemental appropriations for the NCI and NIH, but the $20 million increase was the only one to pass.

AD Honoring Dr. Randy Pausch
Dr. Pausch was a tremendous friend and advocate for the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network and was an instrumental part of launching our new legislative initiative, the National Plan to Advance Pancreatic Cancer Research. To educate members of Congress and decision makers about his courage, and to honor his involvement with our advocacy efforts, we placed awareness ads in the political daily newspapers. To see an example of the ad, click here.

Keep up those Action Alerts!
Every Action Alert you take action on is another voice from the pancreatic cancer community that Congress hears from. Keep those messages coming and help us turn our message of hope into a movement!

To learn how you can help us in these efforts, please click here.