Learn your causes...

It's time once again to jump on the cancer boat!

The SS Carcinogen leaves port soon. Destination: your wallet.

Every now and then the media feels the need to give back in the form of a giant, money-making benefit bazaar geared towards making you feel guilty enough to give away your cash to a vague cause. This time it's Stand Up 2 Cancer.

No, I'm not pro-cancer. But cancer is just such a broad topic and I'd really like to see where the money actually goes. If it goes to breast cancer, then that's alright. I love those things. But nevertheless, whenever a giant conglomerate of celebrity faces start tugging on my heartstrings for a little bit of money, I feel that I might be better off by either slapping their hands away or maybe just devouring their children with some Frank's Red Hot. Maybe I could create some sort of weapon that gives them cancer of the face to make them too ugly to be on TV pandering for my paycheck instead of entertaining, informing or educating me.

Besides... didn't Canada already find the cure for cancer?

From the University of Alberta DCA website, updated March 15, 2007:

"Dr. Evangelos Michelakis, a professor at the U of A Department of Medicine, has shown that dichloroacetate (DCA) causes regression in several cancers, including lung, breast, and brain tumors."

Amazing! And how long did it take to create this wonderdrug, DCA?

"Scientists and doctors have used DCA for decades to treat children with inborn errors of metabolism due to mitochondrial diseases. Mitochondria, the energy producing units in cells, have been connected with cancer since the 1930s, when researchers first noticed that these organelles dysfunction when cancer is present."

Wait, so DCA has been around for that long, but it's got to be super expensive, hard to produce and worthy of major media network theatrics, right?

"DCA is an odourless, colourless, inexpensive, relatively non-toxic, small molecule."

But it must be hard to administer. Something so evil as cancer must take some pretty strenuous treatments. Is it injected directly into the tumors? Is there a big DCA submersion unit? Does it involve some sort of enema?

"Another encouraging thing about DCA is that, being so small (much like this font), it is easily absorbed in the body, and, after oral intake, it can reach areas in the body that other drugs cannot, making it possible to treat brain cancers, for example."

So why is this cheap, effective, simple drug which doesn't even have an aftertaste not being talked about more often?

Oh right... because DCA has been around so long it's unpatentable. It can be produced and sold for next to nothing and would end up taking millions of donated dollars for research not to mention government funding and current drug treatments for cancer out of the hands of pharmaceutical companies.

The U of A is starting clinical trials soon and could still use some help. Don't give your money to celebrities putting on a show with an enormous price tag. Give it to the people like Dr. Michelakis who do real work.