Hc 554 Funding For Research Into Brain Tumours

Download or read book HC 554 - Funding for Research Into Brain Tumours written by Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons. Petitions Committee and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2016-03-14 with total page 77 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brain tumours are the biggest cancer killer of children and people under 40. In terms of the numbers of life years lost, it is the most fatal of all cancers. In spite of this, research into brain tumours has been underfunded for decades. As a result, survival rates for brain tumours - unlike those for many other cancers - have improved very little in the last thirty years. Those who do survive can suffer life-altering disabilities. Brain tumour patients have been let down by a lack of leadership from successive governments. The Governments response to the petition which prompted this inquiry gave us little reason to believe that the Department for Health had grasped the seriousness of this issue. The Government's position seems to be that it has no role to play in identifying gaps in research funding for specific cancers and taking decisive action to provide funding where it is needed. The already-stretched voluntary sector is left to find and fill the gaps in research funding. In doing this, successive governments have failed brain tumour patients and their families for decades. The Government must now put this right. This is a public-led inquiry started by a petition which was signed by over 120,000 members of the public. The creator of the petition, Maria Lester, told us that she was "disappointed with the initial response from the Department of Health, which spoke not in terms of life and death in children but of criteria and process." The Committee hopes that the Government will respond to this report and its recommendations with a different approach.