Bexhill family's plea for petition support

Since his diagnosis with an aggressive form of childhood cancer known as neuroblastoma, four-year-old Jack Jefferys’ family have worked tirelessly to both raise awareness of the condition and to raise money for a treatment known as ‘Anti GD2 Therapy’.

While used extensively in the USA, the treatment – which uses a drug known as dinutuximab beta – has not been approved for use by the NHS, due to concerns about the costs of the drug and its long-term effects.

Dismayed by the NHS position, Jack’s uncle Brendon Jeffery has set up a petition calling on Parliament to intervene and make the treatment available. In the petition, Brendon said: “One of the founding principals of the NHS was ‘Medical treatment covering all requirements will be provided for all citizens by a national health service’ as stated by Sir William Beveridge (1942).

“If we have the ability to treat children such as Jack and many others but do not do so, we are undermining the very base principals of our NHS and, even worse, we are betraying our own children by making funding a real factor in life-and-death healthcare.”