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July 24, 2008ly 24, 2008
The Honorable Tom Harkin
United States Senate
731 Hart Senate Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20510
Dear
Senator Harkin:
I read
just last week how the Senate approved a plan to appropriate $50 billion
for the treatment and prevention of AIDS and other diseases in foreign
countries for the next 5 years. While I applaud your vote in that regard
as a member of the
pancreatic cancer
community I feel once again those suffering from this insidious disease
and the grieving families of those lost to this disease are getting
shortchanged by our federal government with regard to funding for life
saving research.
Pancreatic cancer
currently kills twice as
many
U.S. residents (33,000) each year
than AIDS does.
While sending tens of billions of
dollars overseas to fight AIDS is a noble cause it is a national
embarrassment when our federal government will only appropriate a little
more than $73 million a year on pancreatic cancer research here in the
U.S.
Pancreatic cancer
is the deadliest cancer known to man and patients once diagnosed have an
average life expectancy of 6 months and a five year survival rate of 5%
(as a comparison U.S. AIDS patients have a five year survival rate of 94%
and an average post diagnosis life span of 24 years).
Pancreatic cancer
afflicts over 37,000 U.S. residents every year and causes over 33,000
deaths making it the 4th leading cause of cancer deaths. Today
approximately U.S. residents were diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and
over 90 died of this disease. My own father Louis J. Ciervo, Jr. just
succumbed to this disease on July 1, 2008.
Unfortunately the current funding level of $73.3 million a year towards
pancreatic cancer research is woefully inadequate. As a comparison breast
cancer (which causes a little more than 40,000 cancer deaths each year)
garners $572 million in research dollars alone from the federal government
each year, nearly 8 times that of pancreatic cancer, yet the 5 year
survival rate is now 89%.
This level of funding actually contributes to the continuing lethality of
this disease. The 5 year survival rate has only increased 2 points since
the 1970s (up to 5% from 3%) and researchers are no closer to finding
early detection methods or better treatment options than they were 30
years ago.
Our organization, Fund A
Cure for Pancreatic Cancer
(which can be found on the web at
www.fundacure.com), is currently advocating that funding levels be
increased to at least $1 billion a year. While this may seem like a huge
increase, it pales in comparison to sending $10 billion a year overseas to
fight disease in other countries.
Without a major investment in research dollars which will bring a large
group of talented young medical researchers to this field, I do not hold
out much hope for finding a cure for this disease.
I do not wish to have my children writing to you or the Senator who
follows you in 15 years asking what you will do to keep their father's
efforts and their grandfather's struggle against pancreatic cancer to be
left in vain. As chairman of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on
Labor, Health and Human Services, Education and Related Agencies you can
really make a difference in determining how much money the National Cancer
Institute spends each year on pancreatic cancer research. Someone of your
influence can correct an injustice that is partially responsible for the
lethality of a disease that kills close to 100 Americans every day. It is
just not fair by any stretch of the imagination to only have $73 million
dollars go towards researching a cure for pancreatic cancer, a disease
that kills twice as many Americans and Iowans as AIDS, and spend billions
each year researching a cure for AIDS. That is wrong.
I would ask if we could set up a time and day to meet so I could work with
you and your staff on this very important issue. If that is not possible
I would appreciate meeting with one of your staff members
in your Washington, D.C. office.
Sincerely,
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Robert L. Ciervo,
Ph.D., Founder and Chairman
Fund A Cure for Pancreatic Cancer Research
12 Kuhars Way
Newtown, PA 18940
rob@fundacure.com
215-932-3200
1-800-474-2173 fax
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