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Asked by spacenut1982 to Christina, Colin, Jess, Samaneh, Steve on 18 Jun 2013.
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Christina Pagel answered on 18 Jun 2013:
The short answer is yes and yes….
The longer answer is that cancer is not one thing but many different diseases that share a common feature (uncontrolled tumour growth)… so a cure for one is not necessarily a cure for all. But we are getting better at treating cancer and I do think that one day there’ll be a cure (there are already cancers that have a 90%+ cure rate).
THere’s actually a ton of money in cancer research – really millions and millions are spent on it every year and it’s not money or facilities that are holding back the cure but the fact that’s it a really hard problem! Throwing more money at is not necessarily going to make it go any quicker…
Plus we will all die of something eventually- once cancer is licked, we’ll then justturn to the next thing that’s killing people… maybe heart disease or diabetes or pneumonia…
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Comments
spacenut1982 commented on :
How far do you think we are from a cure?
Christina commented on :
spacenut – again depends on the cancer… for some cancers maybe only 5 to 10 years… for others maybe 20-30 years. Plus of course for many cancers we *do* have a cure – it just doesn’t always work. So for instance women who have breast cancer and it gets diagnosed early, have really good prospects – 85% of them will live more than ten years (after ten years, they stop tracking you…)
spacenut1982 commented on :
Thanks I realised that! It was mainly the years I was after!