September is National Childhood Cancer Awareness Month

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You would think that we wouldn’t need a month to make people aware of childhood cancer, but we do.

Most people don’t know a child who has cancer. I meet people all the time who don’t even realize children can get cancer.

Some facts about childhood cancer worth knowing: Cancer is the most common cause of illness-related death in children. Cancer is the second most common cause of death in children, after accidents. 12,500 children are diagnosed with cancer every year.

What is being done to combat the illness that kills more kids than any other? Well, the National Cancer Institute is supporting research to the tune of approximately $170 million per year.

That my sound like a lot, but it isn’t. An article in Forbes, written by the mother of a girl with osteosarcoma, discussed some of these issues. Funding for pediatric oncology clinical trials, which are so expensive that they can only be done with the support of NCI or a pharmaceutical company that hopes to uncover the next blockbuster drug, is at $26.4 million per year and has been dropping steadily since 2003. This decrease in funding has had a real impact. A number of trials being conducted by the Children’s Oncology Group have had to close, and others have been reduced in size or delayed.

These clinical trials are responsible for one more astounding fact about childhood cancer: approximately 3 of every 4 children diagnosed with cancer will be cured. For some types of childhood cancer, the improvements have been mind boggling – acute lymphoblastic leukemia (the most common type of cancer in children) has changed from a disease that killed almost everyone who contracted it within 3 months, to a disease that is cured 75% of the time.

How did this happen? Cooperation. Rather than competing with each other, pediatric cancer centers have banded together into a single group, the Children’s Oncology Group, which conducts nationwide clinical trials. According to this article in Newsweek, up to 80% of children with certain types of cancer are enrolled on clinical trials. The comparable figure for adults? About 1%.

And while $26.4 million to finance clinical trials may sound like a lot of money, NCI funding for AIDS research in 2006 was $254 million, and funding for breast cancer research was $584 million.

What can you do to help? One concrete step anyone in the US can take is to contact their representative in Congress and urge him or her to appropriate the funds for HR 1553, the Caroline Pryce Walker Conquer Childhood Cancer Act. Sponsored by Rep. Deborah Pryce, whose daughter died of neuroblastoma in 1999. Although signed into law by President Bush in July, the money, $30 million, still needs to be appropriated.

Another way to help is to join the MileStones Virtual Walk for 12,500, sponsored by CureSearch, the organization that supports the Children’s Oncology Group. Or you can support the Committee to Establish a Childhood Cancer Awarenes Stamp.

With your help, we can continue to make progress diagnosing and treating childhood cancer, and cure even more children.

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