"Cancer kills more than 2,500 children in our country every year. Over 13,500 kids will be diagnosed with cancer in the next 365 days. Though these numbers are significant, the potential market is too small to attract the attention of private industry. This makes the role of the taxpayer-funded National Cancer Institute (NCI) especially critical yet approximately 4% percent of its annual budget is dedicated to childhood cancer. The result is that children are dying every day waiting for promising new treatments that lack funding. This puts an extra burden on families with a child battling cancer. Although many are emotionally and financially devastated, these parents have no choice but to raise the money themselves by holding bake sales, car washes and other fundraisers. Meanwhile the NCI controls billions of taxpayer dollars yet it only releases a fraction of its resources to specifically help children with cancer. Ironically some of the most significant advances in the battle on cancer in general have been made by studying childhood cancers, with some of the most important genes involved in cancer first found to be mutated in pediatric cancers. Forty years ago childhood cancer was almost always fatal. Today, through advances in diagnosis and treatment, over 75% of children survive their disease. The challenge is that many children are still dying because progress has been stagnant for the last 10 years due to major funding gaps. Meanwhile the public considers childhood cancer as a largely solved problem and this is far from the truth." thetruth365.org/mission/
Posted on: Fri, 27 Sep 2013 22:51:00 +0000
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