[Congressional Record Volume 159, Number 165 (Tuesday, November 19, 2013)]
[House]
[Pages H7194-H7195]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                  PANCREATIC CANCER AND SEQUESTRATION

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from Utah 
(Mr. Matheson) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. MATHESON. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to bring awareness to our 
country's rate of pancreatic cancer and the need for strong and 
continued medical research of this disease. This year, over 45,000 are 
expected to be diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, a number that has 
steadily climbed over the past decade.
  While survival rates for many other forms of cancer have improved in 
recent years, only 6 percent of patients

[[Page H7195]]

diagnosed with pancreatic cancer will live more than 5 years. That is a 
statistic that has not improved over 40 years.
  Earlier this year, I sat down with several of my constituents 
affected by pancreatic cancer. One in particular, Jamiee, saw her 
father diagnosed with the disease and then tragically die just 11 weeks 
after he was diagnosed. Sadly, this story is all too common when 
discussing pancreatic cancer. I would guess that we all know someone 
who has died from this disease.
  Sequestration cut $1.5 billion from the National Institutes of Health 
earlier this year. This is critical funding that would have been used 
to conduct research on deadly diseases such as pancreatic cancer. 
Everyone I talk to in my district agrees with the idea that funding 
medical and disease research is a good thing.
  We must continue research in this area and begin the process of 
reversing these remarkably depressing statistics with pancreatic 
cancer. We owe it to Jamiee and thousands of other families affected by 
this disease to work towards a cure.

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