Kids with brain injuries thrive at this camp. But federal research funding is in flux

Camp Cranium counselor Anvitha Tharra (right) helps participant Angelica Zander learn to use a bow and arrow. The weeklong event in Pennsylvania's Columbia County provides community, support and fun for children with brain injuries. Sarah Hofius Hall/WVIA News hide caption

In an open field, arrows whizzed through the humid June air and struck their targets. Campers and counselors cheered.

This story was produced in partnership with KFF Health News .

It was archery hour at Camp Cranium in Millville, Pennsylvania. Operations director Drew Meyer watched, a few tears escaping from behind his dark sunglasses.

"They will surprise you, like, flat out," he said of the campers, who have all survived brain injuries. "They'll come out here, and they'll shoot for three hours and start hitting the target."

Campers, ranging in age from 10 to 21, have been coming to Camp Cranium in Pennsylvania's 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.

The existence of Camp Cranium, as well as 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 they did in the 1980s. The improvements in survival are largely due to seat belt laws and federal investments in research and trauma centers that can treat injuries quickly.

But recently, efforts to track and prevent one type of brain injury — traumatic ones — are in flux after Congress didn't renew a law to further research and prevention of traumatic brain injuries, and the Trump administration fired hundreds of employees at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), including the team tracking traumatic brain injuries, or TBIs.