Letter to Member of the Parliament Dr. Kurt Grünewald

Member of the Parliament
Dr. Kurt Grünewald
“Der Grüne Klub im Parlament”
Dr. Karl-Lueger-Ring 3
1017 Wien

Vienna, March 4, 2010

Dear Sir, Member of the Parliament,

In Austria, approximately 5200 persons contract colon cancer, and about 2700 persons die of it (Att. 1). As the weekly magazine “profil” reports in its issue No 6, of February 8, 2010 (Att. 2), in case of colon cancer, the approved medicaments prolong the life of the patients as follows: Vexctibix by 35 days, at average treatment costs amounting to € 42,000.-, Erbitux by 1.2 months at costs of € 50,000.-, and Avastin by 4.4 months, costs € 26,000.- (see the table on page 77). The costs for these therapies are automatically borne from the beginning by the social insurance institutions, regardless of the success of the treatment, just because these medicaments are approved.

On the other side, these same social insurance institutions reject with all means to reimburse the costs for treatment with UKRAIN, despite unbelievable successes, just because the product is not approved. The best example for this is the case of Mrs. Hedwig Jakob, which has been published by reports in television and newspapers (Att. 3).

Mrs Jakob had to undergo an operation due to an intestinal obstruction. During the operation, a malignant tumour in the size of a baby´s head had to be removed. (See attached surgery report, Att. 4). A famous Viennese oncologist has commented such a case as follows: “…in case of your friend, after the operation there is a state of ulcerated adenocarcinoma of the colon that has already developed lymph node metastases. The fact that it was already ulcerated and the bad differentiation lead to an unfavourable prognosis.

However in the court case concerning Mrs. Jakob, he described her condition as “no acute danger to her life”. With such methods the social insurance institutions justify that they do not bear the costs for treatment with UKRAIN.

Mrs. Jakob is still alive today, more than 20 years later.

Strangely enough, the authorities have still not granted the registration of UKRAIN as applied for in 1981, thus infringing procedural rules, as can also be seen in the attached letter to Dr. Hauer, attorney at law, dated Feb 18, 2010 (Att. 5), and the book ‚Anticancer Pharmaceutical Ukrain: Criminal Story of a Prevention’ by Dr. Eleonore Thun-Hohenstein (Molden Publishing Company; Att. 6).

Accordingly, cancer patients are strongly discriminated. The Republic of Austria has been convicted by the European Court of Human Rights due to the delaying of the registration by the Decision in the case No 34983/02, dated February 24, 2005 (Att. 7).

I ask you to eliminate this illegality. Austria is a constitutional state.

As this is a matter of public interest, I will take the liberty to publish this letter and your esteemed reply in the internet.

Yours sincerely

Dr. Wassil Nowicky