Sweet and caring neighbours

Neighborhood Comes Together To Help A Man And His Best Friends

Disheartening

Drug Shortage Linked To Cancer Relapse

A drug shortage appears to have caused a higher rate of relapse among children, teens and young adults with Hodgkin lymphoma, researchers form St. Jude Children's Research Hospital reported this week. The scientists say this is the first example of the tragic consequences of the current drug shortage. They emphasized that protecting patient access to lifesaving treatment must always be the number one priority in any health care system.

People's lives shouldn't be on the line because of drug shortages or for that matter the lack of orphan drugs, which are not considered as profitable as others.

As an aside, while in the seemingly interminable line today, the ladies before me were asked if they would give to St Jude Children's Research Hospital and declined somewhat rudely. When I got to the counter, the young lady, who was obviously stressed from the lack of cashiers and annoyed customers, did not ask me. I smiled and asked her about it, and she said it was $1. I told her to go ahead and put it on my order, and she smiled and thanked me. I tried very hard to not blame the three ladies trying to get the customers out, and was very courteous. Then I went and sat down in a wheelchair (we didn't see it or the electric carts until the end of our shopping) until Brenda got through her line.

When I was 9, I had a classmate with leukaemia who had been treated at St Jude's. Sadly, she died, the first time it really hit me that kids did that, and I've never forgotten her, even though I met her at church literally three days before she passed away. I remember her last name was Probst. Her first name may have been Linda; she had a sister I got to know a little later, and I may be getting the first names mixed up. That would have been about 1976-1977. But since that time, there have been amazing strides in childhood cancer, especially leukaemia, in no small part to the work at St Jude's. They're a very worthy cause, and certainly worth $1 tacked onto your total. If you're in K-Mart in the near future, check and see if they're still doing it.

When I was a kid

There was a young girl I met at church one Sunday. She was a classmate of mine, but she'd been absent a lot and I'd never really gotten to know her. By that Wednesday she was dead, bleeding as a consequence of the leukaemia she'd been fighting with the help of St Jude's Hospital in Memphis. She was my about my age--9 years old.

It was the first time I'd heard of leukaemia, and the very first time it really hit me that little kids get sick and die. It was a profound kind of thing, the sort of thing that hits you in the gut and changes your outlook bit by bit.

These days, thanks to researchers and clinicians at places like St Jude's and others, childhood leukaemia is much more survivable than it was then. But it--or for that matter, any form of cancer--can still be a devastating disease for anyone, child or adult.

So I found this story of interest:

In Treatment for Leukemia, Glimpses of the Future

What is important, medical researchers say, is the genes that drive a cancer, not the tissue or organ — liver or brain, bone marrow, blood or colon — where the cancer originates.

One woman’s breast cancer may have different genetic drivers from another woman’s and, in fact, may have more in common with prostate cancer in a man or another patient’s lung cancer.

Under this new approach, researchers expect that treatment will be tailored to an individual tumor’s mutations, with drugs, eventually, that hit several key aberrant genes at once. The cocktails of medicines would be analogous to H.I.V. treatment, which uses several different drugs at once to strike the virus in a number of critical areas.

In 1976 this would sound like science fiction, up there with the flying cars. Tailoring medicine to your genes? And now it's achieving reality. It amazes me what scientific breakthroughs have come about in my lifetime. It really is exciting to watch. This is a good time to live in, I believe. I don't have utter faith in science, by any means. It's a double-edged sword. But with every discovery we get closer to understanding how things work, and that's great, but also we can apply it to real-life situations make a difference on a smaller, yet equally important scale, or could save greater numbers or whole species.