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

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