US government cuts key fertility treatment monitoring team

The assisted reproductive technology (ART) surveillance team at the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has been disbanded.

As part of a round of cuts at the US Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), all six members of the CDC team responsible for ART monitoring and research have been laid off. This move has dismayed many observers, given President Trump's recent call for expanded availability of IVF (see BioNews 1278).

'This is a big handicap for the administration as they embrace IVF and want to expand coverage,' Barbara Collura, the president and CEO of RESOLVE: The National Infertility Association, said in a statement. 'These are the right people to have at your side. It is vital that the CDC, our nation's public health agency, employs doctors and scientists who understand infertility.'

The team, comprising a group of epidemiologists, data analysts, and researchers, previously tracked the effectiveness of ART across the USA to help prospective parents learn more about fertility clinics in their area. The team also tracked IVF outcomes, including premature and multiple births, to ensure both the safety and success of the procedure, and performed research to make IVF safer, cheaper and more widely available.

The CDC team's monitoring and reporting also played a crucial role in encouraging standardisation of clinic practices across the country. Dr Brian Levine, founding partner and practice director of CCRM Fertility of New York, told NBC News that by providing comprehensive data on IVF outcomes, the team's work kept clinics accountable and motivated them to do better. He added, 'We typically report to the CDC, so I know that my colleagues across the country are practising to the same standards.'

About one in six people experience infertility globally, and the common fertility treatment in the USA is IVF. Success rates can vary with several factors, including maternal age, and also differ from clinic to clinic. Having a single source of truth concerning IVF success rates was therefore central to the decision-making of many prospective parents.

'The data was produced at the clinic level every year, so you could say, "Is this clinic successful 15 percent of the time, 20 percent of the time, 25 percent of the time,"' Professor Aaron Levine, a professor of public policy at Georgia Tech, who used to work with the ART team, told NBC News. 'And you can imagine that is super valuable information for patients considering IVF, or maybe considering IVF at multiple clinics, and trying to make their choices.'

'They're a tremendous resource within the government... I rely on their information and their data to do my work,' Collura said of the ART team. 'I'm not sure what that's going to look like now going forward.'

An unnamed official from DHHS told NBC News that 'the work will continue', although they did not provide any further details.