MILLVILLE, Pa. \u2014 In an open field, arrows whizzed through the humid June air and struck their targets. Campers and counselors cheered.<\/p>\n
It was archery hour at Camp Cranium<\/a>. Operations director Drew Meyer watched, a few tears escaping from behind his dark sunglasses.<\/p>\n \u201cThey will surprise you, like, flat out,\u201d he said of the campers, who have all survived brain injuries. \u201cThey\u2019ll come out here, and they\u2019ll shoot for three hours and start hitting the target.\u201d<\/p>\n Campers, ranging in age from 10 to 21, have been coming to Camp Cranium in Pennsylvania\u2019s rural Columbia County since 2008. Some of their brain injuries are so severe that they have to relearn basics, from talking to tying their shoelaces. Some use wheelchairs or crutches. But during a week at camp, they climb rock walls, swim, and whiz down a zip line through the lush forest.<\/p>\n The existence of Camp Cranium, and a handful of others like it, is a response to a decades-long national trend: More people, including children, now survive crises resulting in brain injury than did in the 1980s. The improvements in survival are largely due to seat belt laws and federal investments in research<\/a> and trauma centers that can treat injuries quickly.<\/p>\n But recently, efforts to track and prevent one type of brain injury, traumatic ones, are in flux after Congress didn\u2019t renew a law to further research<\/a> and prevention of traumatic brain injuries, and the Trump administration fired hundreds of employees at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, including the team tracking traumatic brain injuries, or TBIs.<\/p>\n \u201cBrain injury can happen to anybody,\u201d said Rebeccah Wolfkiel<\/a>, executive director of the National Association of State Head Injury Administrators<\/a>. \u201cThis community deserves more.\u201d<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\tLucas Hardy uses a hoist to climb the 30-foot rock wall at Camp Cranium in Millville, Pennsylvania, in June.\t\t\t\t\t\t (Sarah Hofius Hall\/WVIA News)<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\tCamp Cranium counselor Anvitha Tharra (right) helps participant Angelica Zander learn to use a bow and arrow.\t\t\t\t\t\t (Sarah Hofius Hall\/WVIA News)<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n Tracking Brain Injuries<\/strong><\/p>\n Lucas Hardy, 14, smiled at the encouraging crowd below. In a shady clearing in the woods, he climbed the 30-foot rock wall, aided by a hoist that pulled him out of his wheelchair and helped support his moves. Hardy suffered a traumatic brain injury at age 3, when a tree branch fell on him at a birthday party.<\/p>\n Annually, an estimated 2.8 million Americans experience a TBI \u2014 including about 475,000 children, according to the Brain Injury Association of America<\/a>.<\/p>\n Recent data suggests those are undercounts. In 2018, a CDC team piloted a household survey asking about TBIs in a sample of U.S. children and adults. The results informed a study<\/a> concluding that such injuries, which are often considered \u201chidden\u201d because the damage is internal and unseen, are more widespread than hospitalization numbers suggest.<\/p>\n The mass firings at the CDC in early 2025 gutted the team<\/a> studying TBI, right before they were expected to launch a nationwide concussion surveillance system<\/a>. A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services, Emily Hilliard, did not respond to questions about the number of employees terminated, or if they were reinstated or replaced.<\/p>\n In a statement, she said: \u201cThe Trump Administration remains committed to supporting efforts to prevent traumatic brain injuries, improve surveillance, and ensure Americans have access to practical, evidence-based information that can help protect their health and safety.\u201d<\/p>\n She said the agency\u2019s TBI work is now handled by other staff members at the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control.<\/p>\n Hilliard said the CDC is deciding how to establish a cost-effective national concussion surveillance system within the bounds of current funding, and said the agency in 2026 dedicated funds to support, among other things, an educational campaign<\/a> about concussions, an injury prevention program<\/a>, and concussion surveillance.<\/p>\n But Wolfkiel still worries about how the CDC firings and the impasse over federal funding will affect brain injury research and prevention efforts in the long term.<\/p>\n \u201cThe lack of resources and programs and information that\u2019s out there is really just sort of appalling,\u201d Wolfkiel said.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\tTony Sadowski (right) serves as executive director of Camp Cranium. He first learned about the camp when a speech therapist recommended it to his son, Bryan, who had suffered a brain bleed that caused a hemorrhagic stroke at age 6. Now 18, Bryan (left) is preparing to study occupational therapy at Elizabethtown College. \t\t\t\t\t\t (Sarah Hofius Hall\/WVIA News)<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\tActivities at Camp Cranium include time on a zip line, archery, and a dance. Sadowski says that the event helps campers and parents find community and combat social isolation. \t\t\t\t\t\t (Sarah Hofius Hall\/WVIA News)<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n Federal Funding Uncertainty<\/strong><\/p>\n Tony Sadowski, the camp\u2019s executive director<\/a>, remembers when his son, Bryan, suffered a brain bleed that caused a hemorrhagic stroke at age 6. \u201cYou\u2019re in the emergency room,\u201d he recalled, \u201cnot knowing what version of your son\u2019s going to wake up.\u201d<\/p>\n Now 18, Bryan Sadowski has attended the camp for years.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re very lucky to be able to be here,\u201d the elder Sadowski said.<\/p>\n In 1996, before Bryan was born, Congress passed the Traumatic Brain Injury Act, which has provided many states with grants for TBI research, advocacy, and services. Since then, Congress reauthorized the act four times, largely with bipartisan support, until 2024.<\/p>\n It has remained lapsed since then. Trump\u2019s secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Markwayne Mullin<\/a>, supported reauthorizing funding<\/a> when he was a senator. Congress is still considering<\/a> whether to reauthorize funding through 2030.<\/p>\n Despite the lapse in funding, money is still flowing to TBI programs at the CDC and in states, according to Rick Willis<\/a>, president and CEO of the Brain Injury Association of America.<\/p>\n Congress did appropriate $8.25 million for TBI program activities through the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2026<\/a>. That\u2019s far less than the $23 million Congress provided for each fiscal year, from 2020 through 2024, the last time it reauthorized the act<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cThe TBI Act is the only piece of federal funding for traumatic brain injury at the federal level,\u201d Willis said. \u201cWe\u2019re aiming to preserve what we have.\u201d<\/p>\n The funding uncertainty has not affected the handful of brain injury camps, including Camp Cranium and Bright Ideas TBI Camp<\/a> in Alabama, because they are nonprofits that mostly rely on private donations.<\/p>\n Brianna Engleman (right) collects song requests for a dance scheduled that night at Camp Cranium. Engleman has been a camper since 2018 and says she plans to come back as a counselor to support other campers like herself. (Sarah Hofius Hall\/WVIA News)<\/p>\n Back at Camp Cranium, bursts of laughter, whoops of delight, and distant chatter punctuated the humid summer air.<\/p>\n While her fellow campers did archery or art, Brianna Engleman moved between groups, collecting song requests for a dance that evening. When she was 5, doctors performed a hemispherectomy<\/a> to relieve her of debilitating seizures. But the surgery itself can injure other parts of the brain.<\/p>\n She lives in Northern Virginia and first attended Camp Cranium as a teen in 2018. It was her first time being around so many people like her, said Engleman, now 21.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve gotten more confident,\u201d Engleman said. \u201cIt made me think, well, there\u2019s actually good people out there.\u201d<\/p>\n Next time she returns to camp, she said, she plans to do so as a counselor.<\/p>\n (Sarah Hofius Hall\/WVIA News)<\/p>\n This article is from a partnership that includes WVIA<\/a>, NPR<\/a>, and KFF Health News.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n KFF Health News<\/a> is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF\u2014an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n This article<\/a> first appeared on KFF Health News<\/a> and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License<\/a>.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" MILLVILLE, Pa. \u2014 In an open field, arrows whizzed through the humid June air and struck their targets. Campers and counselors cheered. It was archery hour at Camp Cranium. Operations director Drew Meyer watched, a few tears escaping from behind his dark sunglasses. \u201cThey will surprise you, like, flat out,\u201d he said of the campers,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":15268,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15267","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15267"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15267"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15267\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/15268"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15267"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15267"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15267"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}