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A World without Cancer: The Making of a New Cure and the Real Promise of Prevention - Softcover

Cuomo, Margaret I.

 
9781623361594: A World without Cancer: The Making of a New Cure and the Real Promise of Prevention
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1623361591 ISBN 13: 9781623361594
Verlag: Rodale Books, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

This year, nearly 1.6 million new cases of cancer will be diagnosed and more than 1,500 people will die per day. We've been asked to accept the disappointing strategy to "manage cancer as a chronic disease." We've allowed pharmaceutical companies to position cancer drugs that extend life by just weeks and may cost $100,000 for a single course of treatment as breakthroughs. Why have we been able to cure and prevent other killer diseases but not most cancers? Where is the bold government leadership that will transform our system from treatment to prevention? Have we forgotten the mission of the National Cancer Act of 1971, to "conquer cancer"?

Through an analysis of over 40 years of medical evidence and interviews with cancer doctors, researchers, drug company executives, and health policy advisors, Dr. Cuomo reveals frank and intriguing answers to these questions. In A World without Cancer: The Making of a New Cure and the Real Promise of Prevention, she shows us how all cancer stakeholders—the pharmaceutical industry, government, physicians, and concerned Americans—can change the way we view and fight cancer in this country.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

MARGARET I. CUOMO, MD, is a board-certified radiologist. She is the daughter of former New York governor Mario Cuomo and Mrs. Matilda Cuomo, and sister to Governor Andrew Cuomo and ABC's Chris Cuomo. She resides in New York.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

CHAPTER 1

HONORING A COMMITMENT

MY FRIEND ROSEMARY WAS 48 WHEN SHE WAS diagnosed with breast cancer. The mother of six children, she was the epicenter of her family, its inspiration and its "glue." She was a partner in every sense to her husband, a well-known author and journalist. Both were passionate New Yorkers, and together they traveled the city's neighborhoods and met some of its greatest characters.

After her diagnosis, Rosemary sought out the most promising treatments from the best minds in medicine. Although the treatments were grueling, she was rarely preoccupied by her own pain and never lost interest in what her friends and family were doing. A woman of remarkable grace and dignity, she maintained a generosity of spirit and usually found something uplifting to say to everyone around her.

I recall vividly my visit to Rosemary's hospital bed on the day I graduated from medical school. She was a patient at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City, weakened by chemotherapy and swollen from steroid treatments, but when I walked into her room, she immediately focused on me. I had come straight from my graduation ceremony, still wearing my new pink chiffon dress. "It's elegant and simple, just right for this occasion," she told me, as if nothing else could possibly matter more to her right then.

Over the next few weeks, I visited Rosemary several times. The illness had her more and more in its grip, and I was soon doing most of the talking-- primarily about growing up with four siblings in the working-class borough of Queens. Rosemary had raised her family there too and was comforted by my stories of familiar people and places.

We could still laugh together, and sometimes we would cry together. She reminded me that little matters as much as the love and support that family and friends can offer.

Still, I was a newly minted doctor, enthusiastic about the great medical advances of Western medicine. I thought surely there should be a therapy or a procedure that could put an end to cancer's ravaging assault. Sadly, I had nothing to suggest.

Rosemary died at the age of 52, with her husband, family, and close friends gathered at her hospital bedside. "She took half my typewriter with her," said her husband at the memorial service. It was an overwhelming, devastating loss, and a sense of hopelessness filled each of us who cared deeply about her.

I was not alone in feeling that I had somehow failed Rosemary. Her husband described the incapacitating experience. "Cancer seeps into your nervous system," he said. "Not the disease itself, but the horror of it."

The distress we shared was fueled, at least in part, by disillusionment. What progress have we made since 1971, when our government promised to wage a war that would end in a cure for cancer? Why are we still in a quagmire, without victory in sight? How can it be that in the United States, one out of every two men, and one out of every three women, will develop some form of cancer during their lifetimes? Isn't there something we can do to prevent cancer's relentless march?

In his 1971 State of the Union address, President Richard M. Nixon promised Americans that he would begin "an extensive campaign to find a cure for cancer" and that, in addition to requesting $100 million for that purpose, he would "ask for whatever additional funds can effectively be used." He added: "The time has come in America when the same kind of concentrated effort that split the atom and took man to the moon should be turned toward conquering this dread disease. Let us make a total national commitment to achieve this goal."1

The idea made perfect sense. Many experts were confident that if the government marshaled its resources and focused its efforts, we could end the horror of cancer.

After all, the 20th century was the American century, when we could accomplish the unimaginable. Nixon drew resonant parallels. Everyone knew about the extraordinary results of the Manhattan Project, the top-secret research effort that began in 1936 and eventually brought together 130,000 people at 30 sites to develop the most powerful weapon the world had ever seen.

Another outstanding achievement was the first manned flight to the moon. In May 1961, President John F. Kennedy launched the space race in earnest, going before Congress to announce the goal of landing an American on the lunar surface by the end of the decade. We go to the moon, he said in a speech at Rice University the following year, not because it is easy but because it is hard. "That challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win."2 In July 1969, American Neil Armstrong took that "one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."

It showed what teamwork and a sense of urgency could do.

Eradicating cancer was the next logical mission. The disease was taking a terrible toll--although back then we weren't counting cases very rigorously, so no one can be sure just how many people heard those searing words "I'm sorry, you have cancer." By our best estimates, some 650,000 Americans were expected to get that bleak diagnosis in 1972. Two out of every three American families would be affected that year.3

We had made so many strides in so many areas of medicine earlier that century, discovering antibiotics to cure infections and vaccines to curb viruses. Surely, ending cancer would be no more difficult.

Our confidence was buoyed by our increased understanding of the links between behavior and disease. Smoking had been established as a cause of lung cancer, raising the possibility that other clear cause-and-effect pathways could be identified.

Treatments were improving at the same time. Nearly two in five people who had received a cancer diagnosis were alive five years later, an impressive improvement over the 1930s, when fewer than one in five lasted that long. Promising new therapies for some cancers were on the market, and others were in the pipeline. Thanks to novel chemotherapy regimens, the three-year survival rate for acute lymphocytic leukemia, a common childhood cancer, had risen from 2 to 15 percent from the early 1960s to the early 1970s. During that same period, the five-year survival rate for Hodgkin's disease had jumped from 44 to 61 percent.4

It was time to turn that kind of progress into full-fledged victory. We were moving past some of the research disappointments of the 1950s, when "talk of curing cancer with drugs was not considered compatible with sanity," according to Vincent T. DeVita Jr., MD, a former director of the National Cancer Institute (NCI).5 Optimism was in the air.

MARY LASKER AND THE BIRTH OF HOPE

Mary Woodard Lasker, a Wisconsin native born in 1900, had a lot to do with kindling a sense of possibility. Jonas Salk, who gave us the world's first polio vaccine, called her "a matchmaker between science and society." 6

When Lasker first turned her attention to cancer, it was a shameful disease. "Cancer was a word you simply could not say out loud," she recalled. In the 1940s, the family's long-term housekeeper was diagnosed with breast cancer and had both breasts surgically removed. She stoically refused to tell anyone what had happened. That was a watershed moment for Lasker, setting her on a course to change the trajectory of the disease and how we respond to it.

"I am opposed to heart attacks and cancer and strokes the way I am opposed to sin," she declared.

Mary Woodard Lasker was persuasive and passionate in her own right, and her marriage to Albert Lasker forever changed the medical landscape. As president of an advertising firm that marketed iconic American products, including Lucky Strike cigarettes, Pepsodent toothpaste, and Sunkist oranges, he was a man who knew something about the art of selling an...

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Verlag
Rodale Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2013
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1623361591
ISBN 13 
9781623361594
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
304
Kontakt zum Hersteller
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Verantwortliche Person
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