UNM has argued the number of patients here is too small to draw valid statistical comparisons. However, it acknowledges the survival rate for acute lymphoblastic leukemia could have been better if newer treatments had been used. It has cost us dearly. It cannot be said with certainty that any one child who died would have lived if given a newer therapy. Acute lymphoblastic leukemia is a cancer of cells in the bone marrow.
Cancerous cells can invade the spinal cord, the brain and other organs.
Nearly 2,400 children in the United States about 20 in New Mexico are diagnosed each year with acute lymphoblastic leukemia, the most common form of childhood cancer. The newer treatment, also called a protocol, uses a combination of drugs and radiation and leads to a remission of the disease in the overwhelming majority of children. Instead of implementing the latest procedures, physicians at UNM Hospital continued to use the older treatments, with some modifications, until 1996. Marilyn Duncan, who headed the pediatric oncology division at UNM, was barred from seeing any more patients at the hospital and eventually surrendered her medical license. Duncan, who joined UNM s faculty in 1977 after an oncology fellowship, maintains she made no mistake by using older treatments because they used the same drugs as newer therapies and were just as effective.