Samuel Johnson’s $10 million cancer fight for sister Connie

If there’s one issue Samuel Johnson is ideal at, it’s elevating cash to fight cancer.
The actor and self-proclaimed ‘cancer vanquisher’ has nearly hit the $10 million mark via his charity ‘Love Your Sister,’ which started after sister Connie was diagnosed with terminal cancer for a 3rd time in 2012. “We’ve raised $nine.6 million, and I’m tantalizingly close to reaching the $10 million mark,” Johnson tells 9Honey.

Samuel Johnson's $10 million cancer fight for sister Connie 1

He says he thinks he will attain his fundraising goal with the aid of Christmas, helped in component by way of his new ebook Dear Dad, which features prominent Australians penning letters to their fathers, consisting of Steve Waugh, Kathy Lette, Susie Youssef, Shane Jacobson, Shannon Noll, and Catherine Deveny, as well as one by using Samuel himself.

“The ebook is a surprising, hilarious, once in a while confronting collection of letters to fathers written via outstanding Aussies,” Johnson says. “It is the entire kit and caboodle. It’s as raw and as confronting as it’s far heartfelt. “When I studied it, it confirmed to me just how lucky I become to get the father I had.” Johnson was born and raised in Daylesford, Victoria, with his sisters – Connie and Hilde – via their father after their mother committed suicide when Johnson was just a toddler. At age 11, Connie was diagnosed with bone cancer, then uterine cancer at age 22, earlier than passing away from terminal breast cancer in September 2017, while she was 40.

Built and operated by the Ministry of Health and the Boston-based charity Partners In Health, the Butaro Cancer Center of Excellence is unique in the region: a state-of-the-art medical facility providing the agricultural bad with entry to complete cancer care. A brand new look indicates that Butaro’s pediatric cancer patients can be cared for and cured at a fragment of the price in excessive-earnings international locations.

“There’s this fable that treating cancer is expensive,” says Christian Rusangwa, a Rwandan health practitioner with Partners In Health who labored at the examination. “And it is because the records are the majority from excessive-profits countries.” Published in 2018 in the Journal of Global Oncology, the Take a Look confirmed that for sufferers at Butaro with nephroblastoma and Hodgkin lymphoma, commonplace early-life cancers, a complete route of treatment, follow-up, and social support runs as low as $1,490 and $1,140, respectively.

Much of the savings, the authors report, comes from the low fee of exertions, which, for the whole, most cancers middle amounted to much less than the average annual income for one oncologist in the United States. They also cite sturdy partnerships with Harvard and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, whose Boston-primarily based specialists volunteer their knowledge on difficult patient cases via weekly video meetings with Butaro’s preferred practitioners. “Most people don’t consider early liver cancer in terms of going back on investment,” says Nickhill Bhakta, a pediatric oncologist with St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, which has installed region-comparable partnerships with institutions in Singapore and China. “But there’s a growing body of literature displaying that, for governments, the remedy is especially fee-powerful,” Bhakta says much of the most compelling evidence for the fee-effectiveness of care in bad countries comes from Uganda.

In March, researchers said meager costs of treating Burkitt’s lymphoma or BL. The maximum not unusual early liver cancer in sub-Saharan Africa, BL is hastily deadly, frequently within weeks. Yet, while handled promptly, intensively, and with supportive care, more than 90 youngsters survive the ailment. Worldwide, youth cancers are highly uncommon.

But as Bhakta and associates reported in February in The Lancet Oncology, they’re a miles bigger hassle than formerly believed. They observed that nearly half of all youngsters with most cancers go undiagnosed and untreated, suggesting that the already low survival for those cancers in low- and middle-income countries “might be even lower.”

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