Misplaced Priorities: Cancer of the Attitude?

Updated: Originally posted at Talkleft & Edgeing February 2007
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Since the story of a cheap safe cancer cure first broke on Jan 23 in NewScientistdotCom, virtually NO US mainstream media has picked up on and reported the story.

Google news searchs on “dichloroacetate” now produce only 9 hits this morning (compared to 59 hits in February). Contrast that to 15,433 news search hits this morning on “al-qaeda”, for a bit of perspective. Cancer is a killer disease affecting millions of people every year, so the ignoring of this story cannot be due to any “lack of interest”.

It sounds almost too good to be true: a cheap and simple drug that kills almost all cancers by switching off their “immortality”. The drug, dichloroacetate (DCA), has already been used for years to treat rare metabolic disorders and so is known to be relatively safe.

It also has no patent, meaning it could be manufactured for a fraction of the cost of newly developed drugs.

Evangelos Michelakis of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, and his colleagues tested DCA on human cells cultured outside the body and found that it killed lung, breast and brain cancer cells, but not healthy cells.

Where are the priorities? A short, pointed piece from TopCancerNewsdotCom, that even Google no longer picks up in those 9 news search hits, explains it in no uncertain terms:

One of the fundamental premises of cancer biology is that mitochondria — the energy producing units of cells — are permanently damaged by cancer. What DCA does is revive the mitochondrial function, encouraging the death of cancer cells.

The overwhelming hope is that DCA will move right to human testing. But the overwhelming fear is that it will not — because of economic reasons. There is no longer a patent on DCA so it is not owned by any one company. With little chance of one group making a large profit, there may be no incentive for pharmaceutical companies to invest in research.

Sadly, this drug — that appears to work remarkably well — may never benefit cancer patients. All because no one stands to make billions of dollars from it.

AxisOfLogic takes the explanation a step further towards the real truth behind this, in a February 02/07 editorial “The Real Cancer”:

A promising drug for fighting cancer is found. It has already been proven relatively safe. Laboratory and animal tests have shown it kills cancer cells and shrinks tumors.

You would think the drug companies would fall all over themselves to do the clinical trials necessary for the drug to be prescribed to cancer patients. Right?

Wrong.

This may be the biggest scandal to hit the medical world in years. Yet so far, all the commercial U.S. media have stayed away from reporting on it.
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DCA is not a new drug. It has been used for years to treat michondrial disease. It is cheap and has limited side effects. Scientists decided to try it on cancer cells because it affects the metabolism of cells, the way they use energy. This is a different approach than the chemotherapy drugs now in use, which are toxic and kill off both cancerous and normal cells.

What has scientists especially excited is that DCA has the potential of working against all types of cancers, including secondary cancers caused when cells break off and migrate to other parts of the body.

So what's the hitch?
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The problem with the whole medical industry is that it's not an industry to promote health, it's an industry to promote profits. In fact, the more sick people there are, the more money there is to be made. Pharmaceuticals make up one of the most profitable industries in this country, raking in hundreds of billions every year.

In the U.S., where the medical industry is the most advanced technologically, it's also the most expensive and the least efficient when the cost is measured against the general health of the people. That's why 47 million people here have no health coverage.
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But issues like cancer and the messed-up environment, which can affect anyone, should make it clearer than ever that all humanity will benefit mightily when the parasitic billionaire class that currently stifles true progress is toppled from its seat of power.

This story should give us a pretty clear indication of what kinds of results to expect in the fight against another looming killer, Global Climate Change.

It's apparent that as a society we would rather be lied to and spun into spending hundreds of billions of dollars on chasing fantasies of ghosts and boogeymen, even at the cost of watching ourselves and our families and our children be systematically poisoned by pollution that threatens to upset the planetary environment, and at the cost of watching them die in agony from one of the most horrible diseases known.

The US has a Drug Lobby Second to None. No other industry has spent more money to sway public policy than the pharmaceutical industry: “Its lobbying operation, on which it reports spending more than $675 million, is the biggest in the nation.”

As a species we certainly have some serious issues….. inside us. One of which is that we are incredibly willing to allow ourselves to be spun. Another is our unbelievable willingness to sit back and just take it, over and over and over, even when we know it is being done.

If we are willing to treat ourselves and our families this way, what kind of response should we expect from the rest of the world when America pre-emptively invades and kills them to bring them the wonders of western civilization?