Did you know that
Each year in Australia more than 500 children under 15 years of age are diagnosed with childhood cancer. Children’s Cancer Institute Australia for Medical Research (CCIA) is the only independent medical research institute in Australia devoted to research into the causes, better treatments, prevention and cure of childhood cancer.
The vision of CCIA is to save the lives of all children with cancer and eliminate their suffering. Our mission is to achieve this through worldclass medical research. There can be no doubt that research is the key to beating childhood cancer. It is heartening that the work being carried out by scientists worldwide has helped to boost survival rates from a tragic two per cent before the 1960’s, to over 70 percent today. Research has made incredible progress in just 50 years. However, three out of every ten children diagnosed with cancer will not make it.
These are the children CCIA is dedicated to saving. It would be a dream come true if we could find a way to help the children diagnosed with cancer who still lose their lives – and to spare hundreds of families from the distress of knowing that their child has almost a one in three chance of dying. This was the unthinkable prospect faced by Linda, who was told by doctors at Sydney Children’s Hospital that the lump on the neck of her two-year-old daughter Ashleigh was malignant. At the age of just two, Ashleigh’s father discovered a pea-sized lump on her neck.
Within two weeks, it had grown to the size of a golf ball and the family were told that she was suffering from a form of cancer called rhabdomyosarcoma. What followed were two years of the most terrible suffering for both Ashleigh and her parents. For many months, Ashleigh’s parents didn’t know whether their daughter would live or die. All they could do was wait in hope, wondering whether all the pain their little girl was enduring would turn out to have been for nothing. Fortunately, Ashleigh was one of the
lucky ones. Her cancer was eventually eradicated, and she is today a happy and healthy ten-year-old – a gorgeous, thriving example of the benefits of medical research into childhood cancer. It’s wonderful that Ashleigh is doing so well, but desperately sad that others can not be saved. It is traumatic and distressing for their families, and to all those who have experienced the terrible grief of losing a child to cancer. Researchers at CCIA continue to work towards achieving our vision to save the lives of all children with cancer and eliminating their suffering. Each year more than 500 children just like Ashleigh are diagnosed with cancer in Australia. More than 350 of them will survive and we still have a long way to go to take this figure to a 100 per cent survival rate. By making a gift today you will be helping to sustain CCIA’s medical research programs as we aim to save the lives of all children diagnosed with cancer.
Contacts
To share our vision and increaseawareness participation and funding
please call us on: 1800 685 686,
email info@ccia.org.au or check our
website www.ccia.org.au