Rotary donation to fund bowel cancer research

THE Rotary Bowelscan Committee has donated one hundred and twelve thousand dollars to the Fiona Elsey Cancer Research Institute.

The money was raised through the sale of Rotary’s bowel screening kits and will support FECRI’s bowel cancer research led by Dr Jason Kelly.

Dr Kelly is researching the role of immune cells in bowel cancer and how the immune system interacts with aggressive bowel cancers.

His goal is to develop new treatment strategies to improve patient outcomes.

“Once [bowel cancer] is established it’s harder to treat,” said Dr Kelly.

“The treatment for bowel cancer is virtually the same treatment they were treating patients with 25 years ago.

“Many other cancers try and harness the immune system to try and kill the cancer.”

This donation is the final funding contribution from the Rotary Bowelscan Committee which began in 1982 and is shutting down.

It was Rotarian Dr Bill Brand who first identified the need for an affordable and accessible bowel cancer screening option in Lismore, New South Wales, and he went on to create the test.

The organisation supplied up to 20,000 kits per year, but demand has declined due to the Federal Government’s national bowel cancer screening program.

The national bowel cancer screening program is open to Australians aged 45 and over, while the Rotary Bowelscan kits were available to anyone for $25.

Honorary director of FECRI, Professor George Kannourakis said he is concerned about the closure of Rotary’s bowl screening program considering the high rates of bowel cancer among young people.

“Bureaucracy is not just what’s needed, it’s actually what the dollars and cents cost for it,” he said.

“The [government] are looking at not just the actual testing, it’s all the colonoscopies that they’ve got to do and then they basically say the cost of that is going to cost the health system so much money.”

Dr Kannourakis theorises that infections, such as COVID-19, may accelerate the appearance of aggressive cancers in young people as they weaken the immune system, and he encouraged community members to continue getting vaccinated.

“It’s not so much the vaccines, it’s actually the virus itself in your system that causes the immune cells to go down and we’re not sure exactly how that works,” he said.

“When our immune system goes down, that’s when those cells that have mutations decide to progress.”

Australia has approximately 11,000 new cases of bowel cancer diagnosed each year and around 5500 deaths annually, which is one of highest rates of colorectal cancer in the world.

Early stages of the cancer rarely present symptoms, which is why screening is important to detect microscopic bleeding.