Word: drugging
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...approximately a 1 in 4 chance of being alive five years after treatment. But the odds are different - and lower - for someone who has already been treated and in whom the cancer is recurring. That's because the tumor cells that have continued to grow are resistant to whatever drug treatment has already been used...
...Edwards' original cancer was diagnosed in the fall of 2004. The specifics of her treatment were not made public, but doctors say it's likely that, in addition to surgery and radiation, she's already received three of the most commonly used drugs - Adriamycin, Cytoxan and either Taxol or Taxotere. This potent regimen knocks out tumor cells and causes the familiar side effects of nausea and hair loss. If her original tumor was estrogen-sensitive - meaning growing in response to the hormone - then she is almost certainly taking an estrogen-blocking drug such as Tamoxifen. (See TIME's photo-essay...
...treatment with other medications. If she's on hormone therapy, says Russell, the first step would be switching her to another kind; there are four or five options. If her tumor isn't sensitive to estrogen, she'd go straight to chemotherapy, but probably with a well-tolerated oral drug like Xeloda. These kinds of treatments are taken as pills and have relatively few side effects. Continuing to campaign while taking them doesn't seem unreasonable...
...Edwardses have acknowledged that Elizabeth's cancer is not curable. The best that can be hoped for is to shrink whatever tumors are present and try to prevent more from cropping up. Most patients do respond to drugs for a while, and then relapse. The standard care is to stay on a drug as long as it's working and switch when it stops - nearly all drugs eventually stop working - until doctors run out of drugs...
Forming and operating such a body may be difficult—the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is evidence enough of how easily scientific decisions can become politicized. But it’s worth thinking about now. If a bigger, better malaria-resistant mosquito arrives next year, it would be a tragedy of epic proportions to spend years arguing about who should deliberate its release. We don’t yet have the magic malaria bullet, but we can think about human institutions in the mean time...