With childhood cancer being a controlling factor in tackling daily life, and having been forced to defy a very poor prognosis myself, I feel a need to respond to your letter about Brexit’s impact on children with cancer (14 March). Glenis Wilmott MEP states that 1,700 children are diagnosed with cancer, of which over 250 die, annually in the UK, and that their only chance of survival may lie with being on a clinical trial, due to lack of treatments.
Cancer treatment is dreaded by adults, but is much worse for a child, with the consequences of treatment often casting a shadow for the rest of their lives. With a 40% increase in child cancer in less than 20 years, surely we have to refocus and ask politicians at all levels to take responsibility for their decisions in allowing industries which increase risks and known causes of cancer, such as air pollution. The unborn child can be 1,000 times more vulnerable than a grown man to environmental pollutants, and yet recently activists against fracking have been deemed irresponsible.
Sandra Steingraber, a leading biologist and herself a survivor of child cancer, summarises this dichotomy so well in the title of her book Living Downstream. It comes from a fable about a village on a river. Villagers saw more and more people floating past, drowning in the fast flowing river, and put all their efforts into devising ways of rescuing and trying to resuscitate them. They were so preoccupied with this task they did not think to go upstream to see who was throwing people in the river. It should come as no surprise that the New York ban on fracking was achieved by a scientific team led by Sandra Steingraber.
Survival does not just depend on clinical trials, but also on clean air, water and soil. We can have a very full and long life after cancer, but so much more than drugs come into the equation.
Caroline McManus
Edinburgh
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The role of industry in childhood cancers | Letters
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