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Four Reasons to Invest in
Cures
Millions
of people in the United States suffer from debilitating, life-threatening,
diseases. For many of these diseases,
cures are on the horizon. They are
coming, but they are not coming fast enough.
Here are three reasons why more government, corporate, and private funds
should be spent on accelerating those cures:
1. To relieve suffering.
Living with a debilitating illness is horrible. It's physically painful, and emotionally
painful. And it does not just affect
the person who suffers from the disease, it affects their families, their
friends, everyone who loves and cares for them. When cures are found, that suffering will be replaced by joy.
2. To save money.
Talk of increasing investment in health care often
brings shudders to the fiscally conservative.
Health care is expensive. And
that is the very reason why more money should be spent on finding cures.
Diabetes, for example, costs the U.S. economy about
$150 billion a year. Much of that comes out of federal and state funds. If a cure for diabetes were found, there
would be some costs involved with initial treatments, and with prevention, but
ultimately, as fast as the diabetes epidemic is progressing, a cure will save
our economy hundreds of billions of dollars a year.
If we drastically increased research funds for
diabetes and accelerated a cure, that investment would pay itself back quickly. Multiply that by other expensive
diseases--Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, various cancers, heart disease, etc.-- and
the savings would be astronomical.
3. To save lives.
If you could act today to save the lives of enough
people to fill an airplane, knowing that if you put it off until tomorrow those
people would die, would you do it? Of
course you would.
Every day, more than 200 people die of
diabetes-related causes. If you have
the power to move financing or treatment approval forward, by acting today
instead of tomorrow, you might bring the cure a day closer, and save the lives
of over 200 people. And even if you are not in a position of power, or wealth,
every act you perform towards finding cures, saves lives.
Each day you accelerate a cure, you save the
following lives:
Parkinson's disease: 47 lives
Alzheimer's disease: 161 lives
non-Hodgkin's lymphoma: 60 lives
leukemia: 59 lives
colon cancer: 155 lives
breast cancer: 115 lives
ovarian cancer: 40 lives
prostate cancer: 83 lives
This is just a sampling. And the lives you save when you accelerate a cure are multiplied,
since the same breakthroughs affect multiple diseases. Cell-related research shows great promise
towards curing Diabetes, Parkinson's, and Alzheimer's. Accelerate a
breakthrough, and you would be saving over 400 lives a day. The same is true in
cancer research, heart disease research, and other cure research.
And we're just talking about the U.S. here. Save a hundred lives in the United States,
and you also save thousands worldwide.
Why am I talking in terms of the lives saved per
day, instead of the much greater lives saved per year? Because it is the nature of humans to
procrastinate. If they think in terms
of a year, what's another day wait?
What's another week? And if they
see that each day earlier that they act, they are saving perhaps hundreds of
lives, maybe it will move them to act today.
4. To save your life or the life of someone you love.
You might be healthy today. Your loved ones might be healthy today. But there's a good chance that one day you or one of your loved ones will come down with a chronic, debilitating, or deadly illness. Unless
What
can you do?
1. Contact your senator or representative. Let them know why you think
accelerating research is a good idea.
Emphasize that fast-tracking cures, through increased funding and
streamlined FDA research and approval saves money and lives.
2. Donate to an organization that invests
aggressively in research. Two of my favorites are: