Mesothelioma: Research Funding

Lord Giddens Excerpts

Thursday 16th January 2014 Grand Committee

[Lord Giddens (Lab)]

My Lords, let me add to the chorus of praise for the noble Lord, Lord Alton, not only for initiating this debate but for all his extraordinary work around this issue. In the debate on the Bill in the Commons, it was said quite frequently that research into mesothelioma has a Cinderella status in terms of research funding. It is worth asking why that is so. It may reflect some generic issues, but I think that there are some specific ones.

The best way to consider this is not to be too parochial about it but to look around the world. When one does this, as I did in my admittedly amateur way, one finds exactly the same pattern in the European countries, in the United States, in Canada and in Australia. That suggests that we are dealing with a deeply structural problem, which has some specific features connected to this disease. Thus, for example, in the United States, according to the figures that I have, the National Cancer Institute until recently invested only 0.01% of its annual budget in research into mesothelioma. That suggests that there might be a powerful cluster of reasons that is producing this marginality in research terms. There are four of them, which I will briefly describe.

First, because of industry resistance—we all know the long history of that—most attention has been focused on reparation and legal wrangles. In so far as the disease is known at all to the wider public, it is mainly due to that history rather than to its own characteristics. Secondly, by its very nature it affects mainly working people, who do not have the political clout of the more affluent. Thirdly, in industrial societies, although not on a global level, it can be seen as an illness that will fade away naturally because asbestos is no longer used in industry and most of it has been disposed of, so it could be said to have a kind of natural life cycle. Fourthly, because of those things, the alleviation of suffering is often seen as important rather than the creation of research in a direct and systematic way into the disease that produces that suffering.

If noble Lords will forgive me for being academic and didactic about this, there are three policy implications of what I have described, which I would like the Minister to ponder and perhaps respond to. First, if we are to get more money spent on research—and there will be a need for public backing for that—the Government should consider spending more on a public awareness campaign about mesothelioma to ensure that it is understood as a structural disease in its own right and that it is disentangled from the legal histories that have so dominated its past. That has happened with lung cancer and smoking; the same thing should happen with mesothelioma.

Secondly, I feel strongly that the objective research should not be just to control symptoms but to search for a cure, as the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, mentioned. I checked some of the treatments in the United States and the debates about them; as I say, I am an amateur in respect of those treatments, but they seem pretty promising. Some new treatments have been admitted to the FDA’s fast-track programme in the US, including gene therapy, which was mentioned, immunotherapy and so on. We should look for a cure for this illness.

Thirdly, the most powerful reason for supporting research is not just that many thousands of people are still affected by mesothelioma and will die from it. As we know, thousands of people will do so, but there are even more powerful reasons than that to support research. A prime reason is that we need research into pathologies of environmental origin. We should remember that only 40 years ago or so asbestos was thought of as the miracle substance. We live in a world in which we ingest, breathe in and are in contact with thousands of substances that have never existed before. It takes about 40 years for mesothelioma to come out; a variety of other consequential diseases might be stored up there. There is therefore a great public interest in this, which stretches well beyond mesothelioma itself. I would appreciate a response from the Minister to those three questions.