[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 160 (2014), Part 2]
[House]
[Page 2402]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                       WORLD CANCER DAY AWARENESS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from New 
York (Mr. Higgins) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. HIGGINS. Mr. Speaker, I join with my colleague from Pennsylvania 
in recognizing that today, February 4, is World Cancer Day, a day in 
which we raise awareness about the impacts of cancer worldwide and join 
forces to work together to find a cure.
  If America does not lead the world in cancer research, there is no 
leadership in cancer research in the world. A newly released report 
from the American Cancer Society says that the death rate from cancer 
has decreased by 20 percent over the past two decades. Thirty years 
ago, less than 50 percent of those who were diagnosed with cancer lived 
beyond 5 years of their diagnosis. Today, it is 65 percent for adults 
and 80 percent for children. Cancer research needs to be sustained if 
it is to be effective.
  Ten years ago, 25 percent of all those grants that came into the 
National Cancer Institute were funded. Today it is less than 8 percent. 
We are not only losing important research but also losing talented 
researchers who leave the field because of a lack of public funding for 
cancer research.
  Historically, there were three ways to deal with cancer. You could 
cut it out through surgery, you could burn it out through radiation, or 
you could destroy it through toxic chemicals or chemotherapy. 
Chemotherapy was developed in Buffalo in 1904 at Roswell Park Cancer 
Institute. After those traditional cancer treatments, with some 
debilitating side effects, a new generation about 15 years ago was 
developed to treat cancer called targeted therapies.
  These are therapies that attack fast-growing cancer cells without 
destroying healthy cells. These targeted therapies led to promising new 
therapies in breast cancer, like Herceptin, which treated a very 
difficult cancer, late-stage cancer. Also Gleevec, which was highly 
effective in treating leukemia.
  Today, the prestigious journal Science just declared that in 2013, 
the most important science discovery was something called 
immunotherapy. Immunotherapy uses several strategies, including 
vaccines, to treat the body's immune system to naturally fight cancers.
  What the promise is in many clinical trials that are occurring 
throughout this Nation, including Buffalo's Roswell Park Cancer 
Institute, is longer remissions without the debilitating side effects.
  We have a lot to learn about cancer. It is not one disease; it is 
hundreds of diseases. Lifestyle plays a very important part in the 
incidences of cancer, both here in the country and throughout the 
world. Eighty-nine percent of all lung cancers are due to smoking. 
Thirty percent of all cancers are a direct result of tobacco use. In 
our lifetime, one in every three women will develop invasive cancer in 
their lifetime. One in two men will develop invasive cancer because men 
smoke more.
  We need to know that early detection is also important as well. Less 
than 10 percent of cancer deaths are attributed to the original tumor. 
It is when cancer moves, when it advances, when it metastasizes to a 
vital organ is when cancer becomes lethal. It is when cancer cells 
crowd out healthy cells and render that organ which we need to live 
useless.
  So today on World Cancer Day, we are reminded about all of the work 
that has been done, all of the progress that has been made, and all of 
the progress still yet to be made. We also learned that while it is 
World Cancer Day, America has a unique role in the history, currently 
and prospectively, in developing the next generation of cancer 
treatments.

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