Two weeks after Prof. Michael Scheurer’s team at Baylor College of Medicine began reaching out to families for our landmark study into pediatric cancer’s environmental causes, I am delighted to report that 30% of the first wave contacted have already completed it.
That is phenomenal. The study questionnaire takes considerable time, courage, and effort. And a deep resolve to help others.
As families who have braved the scourge of child/teen cancer – whether our young warriors have perished, are currently suffering the pain, indignities and existential uncertainties of treatment, or are warily eyeing it in the rearview mirror as they move into full remission – we are a community that has proved both our strength and our commitment to find answers.
And as the word gets out through our community ambassadors and across social media, a further 120 families have signed up – the strongest, single burst since The Guardian highlighted the study in an article last year.
I believe that what drives many of us is a search for meaning – at both a scientific and a human level. At least, that is what drives me.
Until our son died of AML leukemia, I took so much for granted. Our good fortune. Our health. Our work. Our happiness. And I tried not to think about the environmental pollution ravaging the Planet or its impact on families.
Still less did I dwell on the lessons of the cigarette and asbestos industries’ decades-long battles with courts and regulators in defense of products they knew to be carcinogenic.
I chose to believe that those were outliers, that most of the time our industry and political leaders held our best interests at heart and endeavored to protect us from harm.
Cause and effect
In short, perhaps my rude awakening was well-deserved. I had been more than a little selfish, more than a little blind. Oliver’s demise induced me to question everything – not just our values as a society but life’s purpose, the Universe’s purpose… and why him? And, of course, the ultimate question that all of us are desperate to find an answer to – what caused his illness?
Beyond “the environment” Oliver’s oncologists admitted they had no idea. They are not trained in the causation of cancer. They are trained to detect, to diagnose and to treat it. Neither did they really understand what constituted the ghostly whiteness that floated up through his lungs snuffing out his oxygen supply.
In the weeks afterward, as I began my search for answers, I discovered that the incidence of child/teen cancer had surged in recent years – which I wished I had known – and that cancer was always caused by environmental exposures – which I also wished I had known.
On both counts, I felt that, if I had known, I might at least have taken steps to try to protect my child that could have saved his life.
Causation… yes, our genes do get involved. They are attacked. And some of us – and potentially relevant genetic correlations are currently put at under 5% – might be more susceptible if attacked.
But that is like saying a 150-pound table tennis champion is more likely to be rendered unconscious by a right uppercut than a 250-pound football quarterback.
We are all different. However, that does not, as Dr. Brenda Birmann, an epidemiologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital who is one of our scientific advisors, exquisitely puts it, “excuse the insult.”
If you or a family you know has been affected by childhood or teen cancer, please sign up to participate in our landmark study at TheReasonsWhy.Us