When 10-year-old Charlotte Kennedy walked into my office in Port Macquarie, her smile lit up the room.
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So did her mother Emily’s. The purpose of their visit, though, was deadly serious.
From the age of three Charlotte, like 80 other youngsters in the Port area, has lived with life-threatening Type 1 diabetes.
She wears an electronic pump 24/7 to maintain her insulin level.
A Continuous Glucose Monitor sends signals on her glucose levels straight to her mum’s mobile phone.
Great strides have been taken in recent years in managing a disease that demands life-long treatment for its 120,000 Australian sufferers, 14,000 of which are younger than 20.
Despite much research, and breakthroughs, the reality is Type 1 diabetes remains a life-threatening condition, and one of the most common chronic diseases in our children.
What Charlotte and Emily want, for all impacted families, is nothing less than a cure.
Good things are continuing to happen that give hope.
Insulin producing cells from the pancreas of people without the disease, transplanted into the liver of someone with the disease, can restore insulin production.
Other areas of research are expanding knowledge that could one day lead to the ultimate breakthrough.
Such work, at the cutting edge of science, is inevitably expensive.
That’s why Charlotte and Emily came to see me.
A great deal of the research into Type 1 diabetes in Australia since 2014, has been funded by $35 million from the federal government.
The money was allocated until 2018, and now the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation and its champions, like Charlotte and Emily, want the government to back it up with a further $50 million over five years from 2019.
I will be writing to Health Minister Greg Hunt backing that plea.
There are many good causes worthy of support and this is one of them.
