With unknown baby, in unknown venue.
When?
Wow! Dick Ingwall has
opened the digital horn of plenty and dumped a load of interesting cancer news
onto my computer. I will deal with a little
of it here, then come back to it in a day or two.
The first bit is both gratifying and provocative. Dr. Mary-Claire King, of the University of
Washington, has been awarded the Lasker Prize, which is an enormously
prestigious award for contributions to medical science. It appears that Dr. King was the first person
to recognize that a mutation of the BRCA1 gene is associated with a greatly
increased risk of breast cancer (and, as it later appeared, ovarian cancer was
well). In her acceptance address she called
for universal testing of women for this, and presumably other related, genetic
anomalies. We have pondered that
possibility before. The argument "for” is
simple; it would save women’s’ lives, as mutation-carriers could gthen be monitored more carefully and treated,
if necessary, when the cancer is small. The
argument “against” is twofold: cost, and quality of life. Eventually, I fervently hope, technology will
reduce the cost of genetic testing to a manageable level. However, it will remain true that such
universal testing will reduce the quality of life for a substantial number of
people; those women who are positive for the mutation but never develop the disease
(and that would be most of them), and – of course – their families and friends. This seems to boil down to a simple choice: is it
better to scare the moderate hell out of 100 women and save one life, or leave
everyone in blissful ignorance and lose that life? To me the answer is obvious. What do you think?
However, several things seem indisputable. First of all, we need more access to genetic
counseling. Also, the organization
called FORCE* is definitely on to something.
Here is the link: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/09/health/lasker-award-winner-calls-for-more-genetic-testing-in-cancers.html?smprod=nytcore-ipad&smid=nytcore-ipad-share&_r=0
*I blogged about FORCE previously:
and several times thereafter.
Linda Kelly I think that the testing, in combination with education and scheduled testing and checkups is the answer. It is far better to save one life then to worry about affecting the quality of others. I tried to comment on your blog page but for some reason can not make it work again.
ReplyDeleteFunny, I had no trouble. Maybe it's the elevated solar wind flux near the magnetic pole.
Delete