Help Atheists Raise $1,000,000 to Fight Cancer

I just set up my team’s page through the directions provided.  Nothing on my page says anything about being under the umbrella of Foundation Beyond Belief.  I will call in the morning, but was wondering if there was an easy way to make sure my team is part of this group.  My group is in Gainesville, Fl, and the team name is, “We’re “Hitchen” for a Cure”. 

Sorry to disabuse you, but the “war on cancer” has already happened (President Nixon declared it in 1971!), and it has wasted fortunes which could have gone to more productive uses:

http://www.csicop.org/si/show/war_on_cancer_a_progress_report_for_skeptics/ 

Contrast this situation with the war on cardiovascular diseases, which has some successes to show for all the money spent on it. 

The cancer my daughter was diagnosed with in early 2000 had  a survival rate of less than 18%.  Today, the infants diagnosed with the same disease have a 56% chance of survival.  You can call this anecdotal, but I have carefully followed the treatments and cure rates for the last 11 years.  Cancer is a very generic term. Sure, the war on cancer might have begun long ago, but to  say there haven’t been huge strides simply means you’re ill-informed.  Going from 18% to 56% survival rate (in one rare cancer) is not wasted fortunes to me.  It means we’re learning, we’re growing, and we’re saving lives.  If you don’t care about raising funds to find cures or help families when they need it the most, then I suggest you just move along.  There is no need to call the process of raising money to help research and family support “wasted fortunes”.

First, you are simply wrong that the war on cancer “has already happened”.  It is happening right now and we are making huge progress.  For example, from The Leukemia & Lymphoma site: 
– “The five-year relative survival rate for patients with leukemia has nearly quadrupled in the past 50 years from 14 percent in whites from 1960 to 1963 to 56.5 percent for all races from 2001 to 2007”
– “The leukemia death rate for children and adolescents aged 0 to 14 years in the US has declined 77 percent from 1969 to 2007.”
– “The five-year relative survival rate for patients with Hodgkin lymphoma has increased dramatically from 40 percent in whites from 1960 to 1963 to 86.3 percent for all races from 2001 to 2007.”
– “The five-year relative survival rate for NHL patients has risen from 31 percent in whites from 1960 to 1963 to 69.5 percent for all races from 2001 to 2007.”
– “In children and adolescents ages 0 to 19 years, the five-year relative survival for NHL is 84.7 percent. This represents a significant improvement in the rate of recovery. As recently as the mid-1970s, most children and adolescents with NHL did not survive five years after diagnosis.”

Second, even if  we had not made any progress, that wouldn’t mean we should stop trying.  Medical technology is advancing quickly and what was not possible yesterday may be possible tomorrow.  If we want to stop this horrible disease, we need to keep fighting.

Todd

PS. I tried to pick a charity everyone could get behind.  I figured, “who is opposed to fighting cancer?”  I should have known there would be someone…

Research and Clinical Trials to find cures are very very slow processes and sometimes the findings are meager.  The war needs to go on for a long long time.   Everyone  thinks research is all about big “breakthroughs”, but it ain’t.   Annie’s example is true.  The changes are barely noticeable by the masses, but the ones who are in the cancer trenches see the small changes.   I am very proud to be a soldier in the “war on cancer”. 

We’ll fix this soon!

The way the beard thing works is you have to start growing it now, and you don’t get to shave it off until the goal is met.  That way you have real incentive to get people to give.

Atheists are a cancer.