- Joined
- Jul 10, 2008
- Messages
- 65,964
- Points
- 113
medium.com
The 2020 Recession Could Cause a Million “Excess Cancer Deaths”
Paul Sanderson
5-6 minutes
WITH 9.96 MILLION NEW UNEMPLOYMENT CLAIMS IN THE U.S., WE NEED CONGRESS & GOVERNMENTS WORLDWIDE TO ACT
[Update, May 15: When I wrote this piece on April 3, new unemployment claims were still a long way from the current 36.5 million. In relation to the pandemic’s effect on cancer, it’s now estimated that in the UK, for example, interruptions in diagnoses, treatment, and trials will result in more deaths than from coronavirus itself.
The All Party Parliamentary Group on Radiotherapy there recently sent a letter to the health secretary demanding the government initiate preventative measures. As a professor, a chief advisor to the group, said, “There are patients who are young and have whole lives ahead of them. They do not need to die because of Covid-19. This is not okay.”]
A 2016 study in the The Lancet found the 2008 Recession led to 260,000 “excess cancer deaths” in OECD countries. The lead researcher said it indicated “well over 500,000 excess cancer deaths worldwide during this time,” especially in countries without national health care.
The 3.31 million unemployment claims filed in the U.S. in the week ending March 21 were the highest in history. The previous record was 695,000 in 1982, when unemployment was highest since the Great Depression. My first thought on reading there were 6.65 million more claims by March 28 was that this is looking like a years-long depression not a recession.
Twenty stars including Scarlett Johansson, Bradley Cooper, Emily Blunt, and Naomi Watts have signed a petition in my wife Briggs’s memory to adequately fund a new era in cancer that’s already begun. Now, more than ever, we need that funding allocated and fast-tracked by Congress. Millions of people are already on the brink. A 2019 Gallup survey found “Americans collectively borrowed an estimated $88 billion to cover healthcare costs” in 2018 and “one in four skipped a medical treatment because of cost.”
The petition’s also been signed by public figures such as former Today Show host Meredith Vieira, PBS documentarian Ken Burns, and 6 professors. One won the 2018 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his advances in immunotherapy, using the immune system. I began the petition after losing Briggs to medical errors while fighting her cancer through four centres in Manhattan.
I’d been desperately trying for a year to get access to an immunotherapy that could have saved her. A large pharmaceutical company, marketing chemotherapy and related drugs, had bought the rights. Just four days before Briggs died, I got word that former CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric, who lost both her first husband and sister to cancer, was going to make a personal appeal to the CEO.
Briggs and I wrote together. At one point we went out to L.A. on the back of an Off-Broadway play of ours to write a fact-based screenplay. While there, we made a film that we wrote. Briggs produced and designed the costumes and I directed and played a soldier-for-hire (for the right causes). I talked Briggs into doing a cameo as his wife, who may or may not be a ghost in his castle. She was reluctant because of producing but she’d started out to be an actress and I thought it would be her one moment on film.
In a cruel irony, while I, as the soldier, spent the film coming to terms with the loss of Briggs, as his wife, we didn’t know it yet but she already had cancer.
Her first thought after starting treatment was to begin making notes for a book to help other patients and caregivers. I ended up writing it in her memory, using a lot of her notes. It was our last collaboration.
A senior advisor to Joe Biden and Barack Obama shared excerpts with the Obama White House’s Cancer Moonshot team. They were particularly interested in a chapter on the history of immunotherapy. It was bringing cures in otherwise hopeless cases over a century ago at the hospitals that became New York-Presbyterian and Memorial Sloan-Kettering.
In articles for HuffPost, Fortune, and the Medical Journal of Australia’s MJA InSight, I’ve written about how it’s finally come full circle. I give examples in the petition of its successes with former president Jimmy Carter’s stage IV melanoma, unresponsive children’s leukemia, and the late Senator John McCain’s type of brain cancer, which also took Joe Biden’s son Beau at 46.
In 2018 researchers at the National Cancer Institute even used it to save a 49-year-old woman with terminal breast cancer, a world first. And yet the NCI’s budget is $6.44 billion compared with Defense’s $738 billion. Briggs’s petition calls on Congress and governments worldwide to allocate tens of billions for R&D of immunotherapies. At this point it could mean ushering in this ‘new’ era, so long in waiting, 20 years early. Together we can end cancer as a death sentence if you’d join us and sign.
The other stars, and tennis legends such as Billie Jean King, who’ve signed are at the top of the Petition Page. A volleying challenge to get signatures has been taken by, among others, Chris Evert, Rod Laver, Rafael Nadal, and Nick Kyrgios. Alan Rickman, before losing his own fight, was the first to donate through it to a major university centre focused on immunotherapy.
The 2020 Recession Could Cause a Million “Excess Cancer Deaths”
Paul Sanderson
5-6 minutes
WITH 9.96 MILLION NEW UNEMPLOYMENT CLAIMS IN THE U.S., WE NEED CONGRESS & GOVERNMENTS WORLDWIDE TO ACT
[Update, May 15: When I wrote this piece on April 3, new unemployment claims were still a long way from the current 36.5 million. In relation to the pandemic’s effect on cancer, it’s now estimated that in the UK, for example, interruptions in diagnoses, treatment, and trials will result in more deaths than from coronavirus itself.
The All Party Parliamentary Group on Radiotherapy there recently sent a letter to the health secretary demanding the government initiate preventative measures. As a professor, a chief advisor to the group, said, “There are patients who are young and have whole lives ahead of them. They do not need to die because of Covid-19. This is not okay.”]
A 2016 study in the The Lancet found the 2008 Recession led to 260,000 “excess cancer deaths” in OECD countries. The lead researcher said it indicated “well over 500,000 excess cancer deaths worldwide during this time,” especially in countries without national health care.
The 3.31 million unemployment claims filed in the U.S. in the week ending March 21 were the highest in history. The previous record was 695,000 in 1982, when unemployment was highest since the Great Depression. My first thought on reading there were 6.65 million more claims by March 28 was that this is looking like a years-long depression not a recession.
Twenty stars including Scarlett Johansson, Bradley Cooper, Emily Blunt, and Naomi Watts have signed a petition in my wife Briggs’s memory to adequately fund a new era in cancer that’s already begun. Now, more than ever, we need that funding allocated and fast-tracked by Congress. Millions of people are already on the brink. A 2019 Gallup survey found “Americans collectively borrowed an estimated $88 billion to cover healthcare costs” in 2018 and “one in four skipped a medical treatment because of cost.”
The petition’s also been signed by public figures such as former Today Show host Meredith Vieira, PBS documentarian Ken Burns, and 6 professors. One won the 2018 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his advances in immunotherapy, using the immune system. I began the petition after losing Briggs to medical errors while fighting her cancer through four centres in Manhattan.
I’d been desperately trying for a year to get access to an immunotherapy that could have saved her. A large pharmaceutical company, marketing chemotherapy and related drugs, had bought the rights. Just four days before Briggs died, I got word that former CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric, who lost both her first husband and sister to cancer, was going to make a personal appeal to the CEO.
Briggs and I wrote together. At one point we went out to L.A. on the back of an Off-Broadway play of ours to write a fact-based screenplay. While there, we made a film that we wrote. Briggs produced and designed the costumes and I directed and played a soldier-for-hire (for the right causes). I talked Briggs into doing a cameo as his wife, who may or may not be a ghost in his castle. She was reluctant because of producing but she’d started out to be an actress and I thought it would be her one moment on film.
In a cruel irony, while I, as the soldier, spent the film coming to terms with the loss of Briggs, as his wife, we didn’t know it yet but she already had cancer.
Her first thought after starting treatment was to begin making notes for a book to help other patients and caregivers. I ended up writing it in her memory, using a lot of her notes. It was our last collaboration.
A senior advisor to Joe Biden and Barack Obama shared excerpts with the Obama White House’s Cancer Moonshot team. They were particularly interested in a chapter on the history of immunotherapy. It was bringing cures in otherwise hopeless cases over a century ago at the hospitals that became New York-Presbyterian and Memorial Sloan-Kettering.
In articles for HuffPost, Fortune, and the Medical Journal of Australia’s MJA InSight, I’ve written about how it’s finally come full circle. I give examples in the petition of its successes with former president Jimmy Carter’s stage IV melanoma, unresponsive children’s leukemia, and the late Senator John McCain’s type of brain cancer, which also took Joe Biden’s son Beau at 46.
In 2018 researchers at the National Cancer Institute even used it to save a 49-year-old woman with terminal breast cancer, a world first. And yet the NCI’s budget is $6.44 billion compared with Defense’s $738 billion. Briggs’s petition calls on Congress and governments worldwide to allocate tens of billions for R&D of immunotherapies. At this point it could mean ushering in this ‘new’ era, so long in waiting, 20 years early. Together we can end cancer as a death sentence if you’d join us and sign.
The other stars, and tennis legends such as Billie Jean King, who’ve signed are at the top of the Petition Page. A volleying challenge to get signatures has been taken by, among others, Chris Evert, Rod Laver, Rafael Nadal, and Nick Kyrgios. Alan Rickman, before losing his own fight, was the first to donate through it to a major university centre focused on immunotherapy.
