Individual Assignment: Health Communication Blog Health Research is Under Attack: The Impact of Data Loss and Research Cuts on Health

Alissa Vaziri
Department of Health Sciences
Carleton University
HLTH 5402: Biological and Social Fundamentals of Health
Presented to Dr. Renate Ysseldyk
March 31, 2025

​Introduction: The Disappearance of Public Health Data
Imagine waking up one day to see that thousands of public health datasets have simply disappeared. Vital information that advances scientific discoveries, tracks diseases, and develops treatments that are necessary to protect public health are all gone. This is the unfortunate reality that the United States is currently facing in the wake of President Donald Trump’s administration. “The shifting landscape in the United States has caused confusion, anger, uncertainty, and anxiety among members of our community,” stated the American Association for the Advancement of Science at its annual conference in Boston on Thursday, February 13, less than a month into the current Trump administration (Oza, 2025). In recent news, thousands of web pages have been removed on the US Centers for Disease and Control and Prevention (CDC) website. Dr. Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan recently reported her concerns to CBC News stating she never thought “that the CDC would actually start deleting some of these crucial public health data sets” and that public health data is “really important for everybody's health — not just in the U.S. but around the world” (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation [CBC], 2025). This means that the loss of American public health data does not just affect the United States healthcare, it also affects Canada’s healthcare advancements, since Canada heavily relies on American health research to inform policies, strengthen healthcare interventions, and gain a better understanding of current diseases and infections. The United States has been a global health leader for a long time with investments in global health initiatives to combat Malaria, Ebola, HIV/AIDS to name a few (Fuster et al., 2017). The “America First” initiative that President Trump proposes fails to understand that global health research is not a charity, it is an investment in improving the health and quality of life for people in the United States, as well as the entire world (Fuster et al., 2017).
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Health research and health data are essential in the containment of infectious, genetic, and lifestyle diseases, in which health research requires appropriate funding and allocated resources to make progress in diagnosis and treatment for patients (Shrivastava, Shrivastava, & Ramasamy, 2017). Additionally, it is important that health data from ethnic and racial minorities are routinely collected and become standard medical practice to avoid rendering these groups as “invisible” in health research (Heyrana et al., 2023). Limiting research on vulnerable groups leads to generalization, exacerbates health inequities, and hinders the development of targeted interventions (Heyrana et al., 2023).

​Figure 1. Protests against the Trump-Musk cuts to research funding. Credits:afscme.org

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​How Research and Data Address Social and Biological Factors
So how does health research and health data shape biological factors and address the social determinants of health? Research has shown that collecting social determinants of health data such as socioeconomic status can help predict health outcomes and create evidence-based interventions to target issues like malnutrition, neurocognitive development problems, and infant mortality (Kachmar et al., 2019). Not only does collection of health data impact biological health but researching variables like socioeconomic status can also help inform policy decisions to tackle systemic barriers in healthcare (Kachmar et al., 2019). Another example is that social determinants of health data can help implement new support programs for patients such as housing assistance, which research has shown to reduce depression and anxiety (Bambra et al., 2010; Feldman, Davlyatov, & Hall, 2020).
So what happens when life-saving public health data is suddenly erased, as is rapidly happening in the United States? Efforts made to address the social determinants of health and health disparities will be severely hindered, which can have devastating health and social consequences for vulnerable populations, especially since marginalized populations tend to have the most missing health data (Rose et al., 2023; Weiss & Waller, 2022).  
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Funding Cuts to Health Research
Unfortunately, the current cuts to American research are not new. Back in 2017, the Trump administration proposed a $5.8 billion cut to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which Congress ultimately rejected (Cancer Discovery 2017; Katz & Wright, 2017). Experts warned that such cuts could have severely hindered efforts to develop immunotherapies and other life-saving treatments, potentially impacting patient outcomes (Cancer Discovery, 2017; Katz & Wright, 2017). Additionally, cuts made to lower drug prices in 2017 did not take drug research and patient access into account, with access to care being a social determinant of health (Dabbous et al., 2019). 

Figure 2. Protestors holding signs to keep funding the NIH. Credits: The Hill

​What Can be Done About Missing Health Research and Data for Canada?
Fortunately, in Canada, we have one of the highest life expectancies in the world according to the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), in which advancements to improve quality of life were achieved through strong investments in health research (Canadian Institutes of Health Research, 2023). However, this success is not guaranteed, and with recent challenges in the United States, Canada could also be at risk. Given that there is potential for disruptions to health research and loss of data due to the cuts, scientists and researchers must be innovative by creating frameworks and investing in Canadian research to advance public health efforts here in Canada. To put the idea of frameworks into perspective, a case study in India was done to help locals implement preventative health strategies to combat cervical cancer but were met with missing epidemiological data like HPV, sexual behaviour, and cervical cancer incidence which hindered the research progress (Man et al., 2023). So this prompted the researchers to develop a framework called “Footprinting” which uses the epidemiological data from other similar geographical zones in India and make educated evidence-based estimates for the missing local data (Man et al., 2023). Frameworks like this can help researchers in Canada overcome missing data by using data from similar populations, ensuring that evidence-based public health research can still be conducted despite data losses. Additionally, Canada must increase health research funding and avoid the cuts to public health workforce, especially in light of the current challenges in the United States (Hoffman et al., 2019; Weil, 2016). As of July 2025, The Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ) proposes that “we can improve our own systems” by implementing better wastewater surveillance and electronic medical records for increased infectious disease monitoring and strengthening overall public health of the population (CBC, 2025; Charlebois & Pawa, 2025). The work that is done in health research extends beyond any political election cycle and is useful for tackling systematic health injustices (Hoffman et al., 2019). Investing in evidence-based clinical practices, hiring more staff per capita, and addressing current systematic inefficiencies will help strengthen Canada’s healthcare during this time of limited data and research (Guyon & Perreault, 2016; Weil, 2016). It is time for Canada to innovate, invest, and commit to evidence-based public health research because when the data disappears, lives are put at risk. 

Declaration: The outline for creating this blog used the ChatGPT AI tool with permission for the HLTH 5402 course. The actual blog was written fully by the author without AI use.

​References
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