A Cure for Radiation Sickness?

Cancer hurts! It not only hurts because cells have gone all mutation happy on you and cause inflammatory responses, cell death, nutritional deficits, etc. but also because the treatments themselves are cell killers too.

The list of side effects for many chemotherapy agents reads like a large volume of Encyclopedia Britannica (do they still publish those?). This list contains things far scarier than the dust bunnies under your bed and far more painful than being pistol whipped at retail on the 3rd shift (I am waiting for that one to happen but I am sure it is not as painful as chemo and radiation...).

Funding for many types of medical research is hard to get. Charities can only do so much and the government is currently more worried about funding a war and getting their annual pay raise. It is disgusting to see what selfish little piggies run this country. Our health care system sucks and all government efforts have gone belly up like an overfed goldfish. I am not even going to start on the Medicare Part D debacle...but instead I want to talk about radiation.

Radiation along with chemo kills cancer dead. Radiation also makes your hair fall out, your bones brittle, and a million other not so fun things. It makes you feel like a scene out of a Monty Python sketch where little parts of you keep falling off but your still alive and wilting like a funeral bouquet. Since almost every person will get cancer before they die unless something else kills them first (diabetic complications, coronary artery disease, accidents, murder, etc.) we need something to combat the ills of radiation.

Oooh, the threat of a "dirty" bomb (ie home made radiation deployer) to our troops and countrymen occurs and poof, funding for radiation sickness suddenly appears. That was a big f***ing rabbit you pulled out of your hat Uncle Sam. Thanks for finally getting around to it. Sam has spent $6 million so far and plans to commit another $82 million over the next three years (this is from "Surviving Side Effects" in Scientific American, October 2007).

Progress is being made and there are several shining stars on the rise for future treatment. It is a sad state of humanity when fear equals funding for valuable research that should have been started and maybe completed twenty years ago. Let's see what the feds think will get them elected next time around since they are all looking bad on the "going green" but still flying in a private jet to appearances thing and they still hate homosexuals getting "married".