Persuasive Speech On Childhood Cancer

Kids are meant to be happy, play outside, go to school, and have fun. They aren’t meant to sit in hospitals, losing weight by the pound, carrying around IV poles filled with poison. It’s ridiculous and immature that we don’t have a cure for childhood cancer. The only “treatment” that we have is chemotherapy- a chemical that seems to help fight off cancer. Chemo doesn’t just fight off cancer cells though- it fights off healthy cells in your blood, mouth, digestive system, and hair follicles. The most frustrating thing about childhood cancer is that only 4% of federal funding is exclusively dedicated to childhood cancer research. It is true that more adults get diagnosed with cancer than kids, but does that mean that adults are 96% more important than children? The average age of diagnosis for an adult with cancer is age 67, and the average number of years lost is 15. 15 years are definitely many years, but not that many compared to the average number of years lost for a child- 71. Also, age 67 is a lot older than the average age of diagnoses for a child- age 6. At least the adults get to grow up and have the ability to even have cancer- some of these kids can’t even get through a fifth of their lives.

One in every 285 kids will be diagnosed with cancer. This means

that one of 285 families will have to go through the one of the hardest things that any family could ever go through. Every 3 minutes, a child gets diagnosed with cancer. This means that every day, 43 kids are diagnosed in just the U.S. That adds up to a grand total of 15,780 kids every year in the U.S itself. One in five children who are diagnosed with cancer will die within five years. Cancer is the number 1 cause of death by disease among children. Since 1980, less than 10 medicines have been developed for use on kids with cancer. Radiation, one of the treatments that is given to some kids with cancer, to a child’s brain can damage their cognitive function. Cognitive function can basically be defined as cerebral activities that have to do with knowledge and all means of acquiring information. The treatments used to fight cancer are old, and we need newer and safer ways to fight this disease. Despite all of these facts, childhood cancer is still completely underfunded, overlooked, and forgotten by most of the people in this world.
Childhood cancer is a terrible killer that deserves to be banished and completely destroyed.

It had no business taking away thousands of innocent children from their families and completely destroying peoples’ lives. It is completely underfunded compared to other types of cancer research. To put that into proportion, according to www.icareicure.org, “In dollar terms, NCI’s funding for pediatric [childhood] clinical trials is $26.4 million while funding for AIDS research is $254 million, and breast cancer is $584 million,” It is true that our kids are worth more than 4%, but we can’t just sit here and do nothing. Let’s put a stop to this disease and find a cure for childhood

cancer.