The squeaky wheel gets the grease

A recent television advertisement in the USA featured a woman in her 30s remarking that, since she was a teenager, she had feared getting breast cancer. After all, one in seven women is now diagnosed with the disease, up from one in nine when she was younger. After years of regular breast self‐examinations and mammograms, she was diagnosed with cancer—lung cancer, despite being a non‐smoker. The voice‐over at the end of the advertisement commented that nearly twice as many women now die from lung cancer each year than from breast cancer.![][1] How the issue—and fear—of breast cancer came to occupy such a prominent place in the consciousness of women worldwide, while lung cancer stealthily became the new killer, illustrates the power of public relations campaigns and patient activism. Together, these forces have brought numerous diseases, including breast cancer, prostate cancer and HIV/AIDS, to the attention of millions. They have raised record amounts of private funding for research and are putting considerable public pressure on the government to adjust its biomedical research agenda. As philanthropic funding is limited, various patient groups fiercely vie for the public's attention and contributions—and ultimately government funding. The public is increasingly confronted with ’duelling' statistics—which disease is worse, has higher mortality and is harder to treat—that compete for their attention and dollars. There is no parallel campaign, however, to raise money to develop new drugs for tuberculosis, even though one‐third of the human race is infected, and 1.75 million died of the disease in 2003.The Prostate Cancer Foundation (PCF; Santa Monica, CA, USA) is one such activist group, which has mounted an aggressive awareness campaign to draw attention to their cause. Junk‐bond millionaire and prostate cancer patient Michael Milken founded PCF in 1993 to fund applied research, and the foundation now boasts an advisory board … [1]: /embed/graphic-1.gif