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Published 12-30-98 (NOTE: Even with a good relationship with the press one can expect editorial deletes! Space requirements, I guess.) To the editor: We appreciate your informative editorial on Parkinson's disease. It is gratifying to see, at long last, an emerging public awareness of a disease too often hidden from public view, sometimes by its victims. A point of clarification, however: The $100 million "authorized for Parkinson's research" by passage of the Udall bill, while heartening, is in no way a guarantee that one penny of those funds will ever go to Parkinson's research. Authorization merely makes money available for a specific purpose. To actually release that money for that purpose, both the Senate and House appropriations committees must vote to appropriate the funds. Neither did. (Omitted: Although they had done so before - for AIDS, diabetes, breast cancer and other diseases - neither body was willing to do so for Parkinson's. The United States Congress has made no specific appropriation for Parkinson's research.) Nonetheless, there is hope. (Omitted: The National Institutes for Health, the recipient of some $14 billion in research funds for the upcoming fiscal year, has long been suspected of over-stating the money it allocates to Parkinson's research. Indeed, there is hard evidence supporting that conclusion, carefully prepared and presented by the one national Parkinson's organization headed by a victim of the disease. These facts did not escape the committees.) Both included some strong language in their messages to the NIH, encouraging expansion of its efforts to find a cure for the disease that, as you so aptly put it, takes its victims into a "vegetative state." Even more heartening, five senators, including Arizona's Senator John McCain, who championed the Udall bill through the Senate, sent a "colloquy" to the NIH. The "colloquy," a conversation among the senators that does not carry the force of law but is entered in the official and permanent Congressional Record, puts the NIH on notice that these senators are intent on seeing Parkinson's research increased, consistent with the mandate of the Udall bill. Will that happen? It will if, as you put it, we "all see the need to end the suffering of Parkinson's disease." Robert L. Dolezal Chair, Arizona Parkinsons Advocates Board Member, Arizona Chapter of the American Parkinson's Disease Association