Eye on San Diego

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Pushing a Men’s Health Act

He is an opinionated and outspoken politician from San Diego’s 51st Congressional District. Representative Randy “Duke” Cunningham is a hawkish war veteran and a fiscal conservative. He was a vocal critic of President Clinton and once challenged a fellow House member to a fistfight. In the past, Cunningham has had to apologize for negative public remarks he’s made about homosexuality and for an obscene gesture he flipped toward the audience during a local speech.

The controversial 59-year-old Escondido Republican is also a survivor of prostate cancer. And personal experience with a life-threatening disease has caused the GOP lawmaker to introduce a bill that (gasp!) increases the size of the federal government—by adding a new Office of Men’s Health to the Department of Health and Human Services. (An Office of Women’s Health exists within the National Institute of Health.)

Cunningham says the scariest day in his life was back in 1998, when a Bethesda doctor told him he was in the early throes of cancer. “When I was shot down over North Vietnam during the war, I thought I was going to die or become a prisoner,” he says. “But even compared to that, it’s much scarier to be told by a doctor that you have cancer.”

Cunningham was lucky. During an annual physical, his doctor noted a slight elevation in the reading of a prostate-specific antigen (PSA) test. Neither a sonogram nor an MRI exam revealed the disease. The doctor persisted, and a biopsy test found the cancer.

“We need to create more awareness about these types of things for men,” says Cunningham. “The biggest part of the problem is that men don’t take good care of themselves. Men live shorter lives than women. And men make 30 percent fewer visits to doctors than women.”

Cunningham’s Men’s Health Act (HR 4653) is cosponsored by more than 50 members of Congress. In 1994, lawmakers established a National Men’s Health Week—encompassing the seven days leading up to Father’s Day. The Men’s Health Act was introduced last year but got bogged down in partisan politics, says Cunningham.

Undeterred, Cunningham says the country needs a “concerted effort to combat the problems facing men’s health.” This year, he notes, 200,000 men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer, and almost 32,000 of these men will die. Mammograms and Pap smears have dramatically helped to reduced the death rate from breast and cervical cancers, and the death rate from prostate cancer could be reduced by widespread use of the PSA test. An Office of Men’s Health would be charged with getting medical information out to men, raise awareness of the need for testing and also provide information about which HMOs pay for which tests.

Claiming bipartisan support, Cunningham is fairly confident the Men’s Health Act will pass. He believes it could take until the end of this year for the bill to weave its way through the cumbersome authorization and appropriations cycles of Congress.

In conjunction with shepherding the bill, Cunningham is working with Mayor Anthony Williams of Washington, D.C., on preparing a town hall meeting in the nation’s capital on prostate cancer. Within the next six months, he hopes to hold a similar meeting in San Diego, in conjunction with (and possibly on the campus of) UCSD.

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