Steve McCabe
Main Page: Steve McCabe (Labour - Birmingham, Selly Oak)Department Debates - View all Steve McCabe's debates with the Department of Health and Social Care
(7 years, 9 months ago)
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Steve McCabe (Birmingham, Selly Oak) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Davies. I begin by congratulating the hon. Member for Bath (Ben Howlett) on introducing the debate and on the thoughtful way in which he presented the arguments. I am pleased to make a short contribution. I have come at the urging of my constituent Debbie Moran, whose young daughter Abigail is just five and was diagnosed with a childhood cancer at the age of three. I understand Abigail is in remission, and we wish her and the rest of the family all the best for the future.
The figures I have seen suggest that each year more than 6,000 young people across Europe die of cancer, but by 2020 there will be nearly half a million childhood cancer survivors. I hope we will bear that progress in mind today. I welcome the work of the European Network for Cancer Research in Children and Adolescents, SIOPE—the European Society for Paediatric Oncology—and the European paediatric haematology and oncology community. I particularly welcome SIOPE’s seven-point plan to increase over the next 10 years the cure rate and the quality of survivorship for children and young people with cancer.
Like the hon. Gentleman, I hope that whatever decisions this country makes over Brexit, we will remain an active part of the important European cancer research and treatment community. As the hon. Member for South Ribble (Seema Kennedy) said, we need more innovative treatments introduced into child cancer care. We need the development of precision cancer medicine to help guide decisions on which therapies to use. We need to increase our knowledge of tumour biology and speed up the translation from basic research to clinical care. As my hon. Friend the Member for Alyn and Deeside (Mark Tami) said, we also need to improve the quality of survivorship and address the consequences of cancer treatment, such as the long-term side effects in all their various forms. Basically, we need to understand more about the causes of childhood cancers.
Although there has been significant progress over the past 50 years—the hon. Member for Bath described some of that—it has largely been achieved by using intensive chemotherapy regimens combined with surgery and/or radiotherapy. There is some evidence to suggest that patient survival has plateaued over the past five years, which hastens the demand for more innovative treatments.
The petition focuses on the problems we need to address, such as the lack of sustained and sufficient funding. As has been suggested, there is also poor access right across Europe to new paediatric drugs. Too many countries do not recognise paediatric haematology and oncology as a sub-speciality. For the sake of Abigail and thousands of children like her, and in memory of Poppy-Mai, whose parents are the originators of the petition, we need to dedicate ourselves to saying that we recognise the seriousness of the issue and that we are going to do more.