From Ralph Moss, www.cancerdecisions.com
It is indeed scandalous that promising anti-cancer agents such as dichloroacetate (DCA) go begging for support simply because they are cheap and unpatentable (20 January, p 3 and p 13). You have done a great service in bringing this information and perspective before the public.
However, after you published online your first article on this proposed anti-cancer treatment (17 January), my medical information service was deluged with demands from desperate patients for what you call a “too good to be true” wonder drug. We had to inform them that DCA had never been tested in humans, only in cell lines and experimental animals, and that it was totally unavailable to today’s patients.
You did explain that it is too early to draw therapeutic conclusions, despite the promising lab work. But the magazine headline “Cheap, safe drug kills most cancers” implies that DCA is known to destroy actual tumours in humans. This continues to generate waves of unwarranted expectation among many patients and has already resulted in severe disappointment for people seeking a solution to life-threatening cancers.
It should also be pointed out that DCA is a by-product of the water chlorination process and a well-known environmental pollutant. It has been shown to be carcinogenic in rodent models and is also genotoxic, hepatotoxic and teratogenic in animals, all at doses well below what would seemingly be necessary to achieve a therapeutic effect in cancer patients. There are worthwhile anti-cancer drugs that are carcinogenic. But it would have been good to inform readers of this.
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Lemont, Pennsylvania, US
