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  by Anonymous |

  Aug 11, 2008(8 days ago) |

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  Overall Rating: 5.0 |

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  While I am thrilled about the legislation recently passed for the expansion of Pediatric cancer research, I am equally distressed that there is so little interest in the possible causes of the disease.
  
  I lost a child to cancer in 1997. He had cancer when he was 5 years old and died at the age of 19 from the same rabid disease, Rhabdomyosarcoma. I have never been able to identify the cause!! To this day, almost 11 years later, no one is able to tell me why my child contracted the disease and the children next door, and my two daughters did not. Surely, some research needs to be done to identify whether or not high tension electrical wires, open uranium pits, nuclear power plants, or the like have any impact on the health of our children.
  
  Identification of the probable cause of breast cancer or the risks apparent in causing breast cancer, colon cancer, lung cancer have been identified. What about children's cancers, they do not drink or smoke, they eat ruffage and the like and still they are dying. My son, 5 and a half years old, developed this cancer from nowhere? Is that what I am to understand. We would rather put all our energies into treating rather than having some legislation to identify the cause and putting it away?? Of course I believe in treatment, even though all the treatment in the world could not help mine, there are many children that have survived, but, why do we have to do this?? Why do we not find out the cause and kill that instead??
  
  When I went to the school board with my concerns of the high tension wires behind my son's school and the high incidence of children's cancer in that same school, I was practically laughed out of the session. When I wrote to the CDC and explained that there were open uranium mines in the area I lived, with the possibility of leakage into the aquafer, I got no response. When will the research into these things be funded. When will we listen to the Tooth Fairy Project and strontium 90 in our children's baby teeth be addressed?
  
  Personally, I know you can answer none of my questions and you may not even respond to my email, but, I am a distressed mother and a medical professional. I want answers now and I want legislation to study the CAUSE, AS WELL AS THE TREATMENT, of childhood cancers. Please figure out a way to put this into the policy also. Lets not have more of our precious commodities die before our eyes, while we are trying to figure out treatments, lets figure out the cause as well.
  
  Thank you again for the wonderful work you are doing.
  
  Helen C. Woolf MSN, RNBC
  Mother of Jonathan
  1977-1997
  Rhabdomyosarcoma

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