NIH Cancels Child Health Study

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has cancelled its plan for an ambitious, multi-decade study of environmental influences on children's health, agency director Francis Collins has announced.

The National Children's Study (NCS), commissioned by Congress in 2000, was to assess how physical, chemical, biological and psychosocial factors affected 100,000 children from birth to age 21. The NIH has spent $1.2 billion on the effort and enrolled roughly 5,700 children in a pilot study at 40 centers around the United States. But a combination of scientific disagreements and mismanagement has delayed the study's official start
.