Warnings of scientific ‘suicide’ as US-China research collaboration hangs in balance

China’s Deng Xiaoping and US president Jimmy Carter at the White House in 1979. Experts have expressed concern about the potential end of the US-China Science and Technology Agreement. Photograph: Consolidated Pictures/AFP/Getty Images

In 1991, about 25 babies in every 100,000 in the United States were born with spina bifida, a birth defect that can cause paralysis and brain damage. Fifteen years later, the likelihood had fallen by nearly one-third. That so many babies could be spared such a fate was thanks to the simple discovery that folic acid supplements could dramatically reduce the chances of neural tube defects, which cause spina bifida and anencephalus, a rarer condition.

It was “one of the great successes of public health,” according to Tom Frieden, a former director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) – and it was a success that was established in China during a collaboration between researchers from the CDC in Atlanta and Peking University Health Science Center in Beijing.