Many cancers are in fact overfunded relative to their societal impact. Moreover too much money is spent on chasing cures rather than prevention:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3411479/ http://www.slate.com/blogs/quora/2013/02/07/where_do_the_mil...
Prevention education is important, but I wonder if the meat counter will be restricted to 18 and over to purchase and come with a warning from the surgeon general.
I'm being unusually sarcastic, but I've had this conversation several times in my own head and I can't figure out a solution.
Leaded gasoline was poising the nation, but no one stopped driving. Only when the government forced the corporations to change did the lead poising stop.
You can't make someone change, you can't force an individual to change but if you never allow it to enter their world then it has been prevented right?
Bring back shaming. Encourage fat shaming. Encourage alcohol shaming. We still encourage smoke-shaming, and it has resulted in a reduction in smoking. We need to stop being so afraid and sensitive to shame. It is a natural human tendency to police behaviors with negative externalities via shame.
Pass all the laws you want, but social shame is far more effective.
And we still go skiing, and we still take nonessential car trips. Things have benefits as well as costs.
One thing we try to remember is that those five year cohorts lack all the advances in the previous half decade. The five year survival percentage could have improved dramatically!
Yet, you know, there are actually cancers that strike kids before they even have a chance to reach puberty. One in particular is Rhabdomyosarcoma which is a cancer of muscle tissue that essentially is a death sentence. The treatments that exist are limited, and funding does exist to work on it, but it's not a well known issue until it hits a family, which means funding is pretty much dependent on foundations willing to spend money on a hard challenge that isn't glamorous.
What do I mean by glamorous? I mean breast cancer. Pancreatic cancer. Colon cancer. The things that are likely to hit a large group of people.
I sincerely hope the best for your sister, I really do. She's about to enter a world which is a new perspective on life. Over time I've learned that a lot of people don't value what they have until it's in jeopardy, and when the bubble gets burst, when mortality is staring strong, that's when it's time to get real, to bite down on the belt and take the pain if it means survival. Stay strong, and tomorrow holds a future that none of us can predict.
Shows how quickly your world can come crashing. Cancer is awful. Cancer and global warming are where most of the worlds research dollars should be going. This story brings hope for the future.