Don’t Drop the Baton On This One

Relay for Life will be held in Clemson on April 7th. For those of you who have never participated, it is, as the American Cancer Society puts it, “a fun-filled overnight event designed to celebrate survivorship and raise money to help the American Cancer Society save lives, help those who have been touched by cancer, and empower individuals to fight back against this disease.” Cancer is an issue which affects most of us directly, with family or friends having to fight the often deadly disease. Apparently George Bush is one of the few not affected. In his 2006 budget, he proposes 40 million dollars in cuts to the National Cancer Institute. This institute funds the large majority of the cancer research going on in the United States today. The cuts affect us directly here at Clemson with a Clemson researcher holding one of the grants from the NCI to study nonparametric multiple regression techniques. While, like you, I have no clue what that means, important research like this currently is being funded at universities across the country including the University of South Carolina and the Medical University of South Carolina. Even at its current funding level, only 11% of the grants applied for through NCI are able to be accepted.

Another important cancer related cut that directly affects some of the women here at Clemson is the proposed 1.2 million dollar cut to the National Breast and Cervical Cancer Early Detection Program. This program makes available free cancer screenings to low-income and uninsured women and despite being under funded has proven successful. In the past three years the program has detected 23,000 cases of breast cancer and 1,500 cases of cervical cancer. That’s a lot of women that have potentially been saved by early detection.

The U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary, Michael Leavitt, says, “We had to make hard choices, hard choices about very well-intentioned programs. Every program is important to someone.” While I agree the choices had to be hard, cancer is important to a whole lot of someones. While sacrifices must be made to solve the current budget crisis Bush has put us in, priorities must be set. We can not surrender the long term health of America to a disease which affects so many. The current level of funding already seems inadequate and cuts would only further decrease the rate of progress on cancer research. At least now you’ll have something to think about as you walk around that bag-lit path at Relay for Life.