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American Morning

Geraldine Ferraro Fights Cancer

Aired June 19, 2001 - 09:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
LEON HARRIS, CNN ANCHOR: We're going to begin with word this morning that Geraldine Ferraro is battling blood cancer. Ferraro was diagnosed with multiple myeloma in 1998. The former Democratic nominee for vice president says her disease has been classified as inactive for two years now. Ferraro has been described -- prescribed, rather, with thalidomide, a drug which was banned decades ago after it was linked to birth defects.

Now for more on that disease and the drug itself, we turn to our medical news correspondent Elizabeth Cohen this morning.

Good to see you.

ELIZABETH COHEN, CNN MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Good to see you.

Geraldine Ferraro and her doctors say that she's making great progress and they attribute much of that success to thalidomide, a drug with a horrible past. It was prescribed in the 1950's and early 1960's to pregnant women to help fight morning sickness. Then, more than 10,000 children were born with severe birth defects and the drug was banned in 1969 and it became the shining example of why the country needed better drug testing before marketing. And the terrible experiences with thalidomide helped define the job of the current Food and Drug Administration.

Geraldine Ferraro and her doctors say she's making progress now on thalidomide. Thalidomide is a welcome addition to the arsenal against multiple myeloma and the reason for that is that it's a particularly deadly cancer. For example, more than 14,000 cases are diagnosed each year and there are more than 11,000 deaths each year and 50 percent of all patients die within five years of diagnosis.

Now what happened was that in the 1990's, doctors found that it might be useful to treat multiple myeloma as well as other diseases such as AIDS and leprosy with thalidomide. Now traditional treatments against multiple myeloma include chemotherapy and radiation and bone marrow transplantation. And this thalidomide will now be the first drug that's been -- the first drug that's been used against multiple myeloma when a patient has relapsed and that's why it's a particularly welcome addition.

HARRIS: Do we know exactly how thalidomide works against this kind of cancer? COHEN: You know what, we -- they just don't know, but they do have a theory. The theory is that thalidomide works as an antiangiogenesis agent. What that means is that all cancer tumors need blood vessels in order to supply -- the vessels supply the blood. They also supply nutrients. And what they think is that thalidomide might cut back on some of the blood that gets supplied so the tumor can't live as well.

HARRIS: Yes. Let me ask you something else because I saw it as comp (ph) attributed to Geraldine Ferraro this morning where she was saying my family doesn't die from cancers, we die from heart attacks.

COHEN: Right. Right.

HARRIS: It was -- in other words, cancer was not something that was a family trait at all anywhere in her family line. How is it then that this can come up in her family?

COHEN: Well, you know what, that's classical for multiple myeloma. It usually is not in the family. It's not, for example, like breast cancer. If a woman's mother had breast cancer, she can -- she can check herself out, she can see if she carries some of the genes that would make her more susceptible to cancer. That's not true with multiple myeloma. It usually affects people who have no history whatsoever.

HARRIS: So there's no trait whatsoever with -- can pop up in the family line or the family's history...

COHEN: Not the...

HARRIS: ... that would tip you off?

COHEN: The vast majority, no, it's just -- it's just random.

HARRIS: Interesting.

COHEN: It's just random.

HARRIS: All right, thanks. Elizabeth Cohen, we appreciate it.

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