Melinda Marchiano

Pharmaceutical Companies Challenge

Grace: A Child's Intimate Journey Through Cancer and Recovery

The U.S. invests approximately $595,000 for research per victim of pediatric AIDS and only $20,000 for each victim of childhood cancer.

Treating children with cancer is not profitable for pharmaceutical companies.  Without huge changes to the PharmaceuticalCompanyGreedMachine, we will continue to fail the children of our country. Childhood cancer is the number one cause of death by disease in the United States.  Since the causes of childhood cancer remain a mystery, it seems to me that our country should be pouring time, sweat, and money into finding the cause and to creating a cure.

Instead, it seems to me there are many ostriches with their heads and necks stuck deep in the sand.  They don’t want to pull their heads out and look around because the truth will be ugly.  The ugliness is not childhood cancer; the ugliness is the fact that childhood cancer continues its rampage of destruction while we sit idly by.  I don’t have their financial documents in front of me for audit, but I will bet that pharmaceutical companies are making a large enough profit where they would be able to donate a few million for altruistic purposes like wiping out childhood cancer.  Yes, I call on each pharmaceutical company to audit the hearts of your CEO’s.

“The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything.” ~Albert Einstein

Imagine how difficult it is for a child to fight cancer. Then, take in this reality…

“In the past 30 years ONLY ONE new cancer drug has been approved for pediatric cancer.”

                                                                                       ~Pablove Foundation

Can we, knowing this truth, sit with our mouths silent?

I cannot.

For the children who survive childhood cancer, 2/3 will suffer some form of lifelong effect from the treatment. All too often, it is the treatment that kills a child fighting cancer. All too often, it is the treatment that causes extreme pain and suffering.

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/story?id=2553765&page=1#.Tr7zREOa9tN

“We are desperate for new treatments. We have not had a single meaningful improvement in pediatric cancer medication in decades and the children have paid the price,” says Dr. Peter Adamson, chief of the Division of Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “Even though we cure four out of five pediatric cancer patients, even those who survive often go on to have lifelong side effects from the treatment we give them.”

This news story tells more about the difficulty of getting big pharmaceutical companies to develop new, less-toxic treatments for children with cancer…

 http://abcnews.go.com/Health/CancerPreventionAndTreatment/big-pharma-treat-childhood-cancers/story?id=14571277

What a sad truth it is to know that it will take legislation like the Creating Hope Act to lure pharmaceutical companies into doing what is the ethically right thing to do.

I invite all pharmaceutical companies to prove me wrong… show us that the health and happiness of our children are more important than any amount of profit you can gather and store.

Please don’t wait. Time is paramount.

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