– Three Top Scientists Join our Scientific Advisory Panel, including Former Member of President’s Cancer Panel
– Our Landmark Online Pediatric Cancer Study Launched by World’s Biggest Medical Center
– Nearly 600 Families Sign Up with TheReasonsWhy.Us
– Prevention Becomes the New Paradigm as 60+ Environmental Health Groups Kick Off “Childhood Cancer Prevention Initiative”
Dear Families and Supporters,
What a year was 2020. After four years of build-up, and despite a global pandemic halting our lives, our groundbreaking online investigation with Baylor College of Medicine into the environmental risk factors associated with pediatric cancer began.
In June, Dr Michael Scheurer’s research team, part of Texas Medical Center, the largest medical complex in the world, launched their outreach to the hundreds of families who have signed up – as we continue to drive recruitment at www.TheReasonsWhy.Us.
Baylor’s epidemiological study addresses diet, neonatal exposures, medications, infections, and sports and leisure activities. Once the data is collected, Dr Scheurer’s team will assess exposures to key toxicants. This will involve multiple datasets including air and water studies, exposure to pollution and analyses of baby teeth for the presence of these chemicals early in life.
Paradigm Shift
Our timing was extraordinary. Even as the first of our families began to take the questionnaire, more than 60 groups focused on environmental health and comprising of scientists, business leaders and policy experts formed the Childhood Cancer Prevention Initiative.
This led to a report (Childhood Cancer: Cross-Sector Strategies for Prevention) calling for “chemical producers, manufacturers and retailers to turn off the tap on toxic chemicals and replace them with viable, safer alternatives that people can access regardless of their economic status.”
In the report’s Foreword, Dr Philip Landrigan, Director, Global Public Health and the Common Good, Boston College and Professor of Biology, Schiller Institute for Integrated Science and Society, Boston College, wrote: “We must require that all new chemicals and all widely-used existing chemicals be tested for safety and toxicity.
“We can no longer allow our children to be exposed to thousands of chemicals of unknown hazard. We must support strong research programs that include epidemiological and toxicological studies. We must strengthen state and federal laws to better protect our children – and we must enforce those laws… We must act as true guardians of our children.”
Top Scientists Join Advisory Panel
In October, Dr Landrigan – thanks to whom we are no longer being poisoned by lead in our gasoline – was among three of the most eminent pediatric and cancer research scientists in the USA to join our Scientific Advisory Panel.
Dr Margaret Kripke also honored us by becoming part of our Panel. Dr Kripke is former executive vice president and chief academic officer at University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. She served multiple terms on the three-person President’s Cancer Panel, where she produced the ground-breaking 2009 report, Reducing Environmental Cancer Risk: What We Can Do Now.
Our third new member is Dr Martyn Smith, Professor of Toxicology and Kaiser Professor of Cancer Epidemiology, School of Public Health, UC Berkeley. Dr Smith’s research is aimed at finding the causes of chronic diseases, including cancer and diabetes. He is renowned for his work on the links between benzene and leukemia, the exposome (the totality of exposures experienced by an individual), and the key characteristics of carcinogens.
We are deeply grateful to these renowned and talented scientists for joining our existing Panel members – Dr Scheurer, Dr Brenda Birmann, and Dr Haneen Abdella – as we prepare to build on our efforts in 2021.
Proof of Concept
We have demonstrated proof of concept. Bifurcating the recruitment of families affected by pediatric cancer (our role) from the execution of the study itself (Baylor’s) has opened the doors to the volume and diversity of data critical to the study’s success. We have secured the participation of families from 47 states in the USA as well as from the UK, Singapore, Ireland, South Africa, Australia, Saudi Arabia, Colombia and Canada.
Our key objectives for 2021 are recruitment and funding. For the former, we need the latter – to drive a communications strategy that inspires and embraces affected families across the USA and across the world who seek not only answers, but change.
Other 2021 initiatives range from providing online discount codes exclusive to our families (more on this shortly!) to building out educational materials for families to help reduce their risk of exposure to toxic environmental hazards.
The donations we received from so many kind and generous people in the aftermath of our son’s passing have proved to be the seed capital for a project far bigger than we ever imagined. Having now proved our mettle and value, in order to take TheReasonsWhy.Us to the next stage, we need fresh, substantial and sustained support.
As such, we will begin to reach out to a range of grant-giving organizations and private foundations, including potentially the National Institutes of Health (with Baylor).
We will never solicit funds from our families – although for the sake of simplicity and convenience we are sending out this Newsletter both to our families and to our supporters. And we have now placed a PayPal button for The Oliver Foundation, a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization of which TheReasonsWhy.Us is our principal project, on www.TheReasonsWhy.Us website.
We wish you a wonderful – and healing – 2021.