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With regard to PET scans, we're behind world

BY DR. DAVID WEBSTER Double shame on you Rick Bartolucci! Ontario is the last medical jurisdiction in the world to accept the overwhelming benefit of PET for patients like Sam Bruno. (Letter to the Editor, Sunday, Dec.
BY DR. DAVID WEBSTER

Double shame on you Rick Bartolucci!

Ontario is the last medical jurisdiction in the world to accept the overwhelming benefit of PET for patients like Sam Bruno. (Letter to the Editor, Sunday, Dec.11)

More than 30,000 Ontario cancer patients need a PET scan and 30 percent would have significant changes in their management resulting in lower cost
to the health-care system by eliminating unnecessary testing and surgery.

For colon cancer patients followed appropriately by PET scanning, their chances of survival at three years are improved up to 77 percent. Sudbury patients Gabe Belanger and Glen Scarr were told they had terminal colon cancer only to have a PET scan demonstrate they had operable cancers which were subsequently removed.

They and their families asked to speak to Bartolucci. He refused saying they were not from his jurisdiction. What would he have said if they wanted to congratulate him on his Highway 69 project?

Bartolucci has refused to meet with me. His response to Bruno is a complete "fiction" and is insulting. He is a coward, and worse with "full knowledge," he has abandoned the North's cancer patients. They are in a Third World status. In Turkey and Chile, a PET scan would have been routine for Bruno.

What are some "facts" Bartolucci is aware of?

- OHIP routinely covers investigational radiotracers like PET tracers.

- The most senior PET expert in the ministry PET trials wrote Health Minister George Smitherman in April 2004 and stated: (Smitherman, and Bartolucci refuse to comment on the letter.)

The government is deliberately delaying PET because of cost concerns.

Government employed physicians are denying the data in favour of PET.

Ontario is a decade behind the rest of the world.

- The Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care has refused to answer a single question my colleagues and I have put forward regarding these trials.

- The Canadian Society of Nuclear Medicine has declared the Ontario PET trials unethical and demanded an international team of ethics, PET and cancer specialists be brought in to review the trials.

- The government spent more than $600,000 sending patients to the states for this "unproven" medical test at up to $6000 (US) plus travel expenses.

They refuse to pay an Ontario company which offered them PET scans at a fraction of the cost. They are paying Quebec to perform PET scans on Ontario cancer patients.

It is time Bartolucci was held accountable for his deliberate actions to assist Premier Dalton McGuinty's plan to block PET from Ontario's cancer (and heart and dementia) patients.

For those who care about cancer, Bartolucci's e-mail is [email protected].

I am starting a petition to demand Bartolucci attends a public meeting on his unconscionable abandonment of our cancer patients. Send your support to [email protected] or to Sudbury Regional Hospital. 700 Paris St., Sudbury P3E 3B5.

Dave Webster is a Sudbury medical doctor.