A Bold Initiative
The StormStrong Foundation was founded in 2019 by Drs. Matt and Julieta Rushford and is one of the leading charitable organizations in the country devoted to supporting efforts to determining the causes of childhood cancer and promoting initiatives designed to reduce their incidence.
Our Mission
Despite the massive amount of energy we put into “cancer awareness”, childhood cancer rates in the U.S. are not falling, they are rising. In the last 35 years, the incidence of Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia, or ALL, has increased by a staggering 35% and Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML) has risen by 42%. And while survival rates have improved (for developed countries at least), treatments continue to be brutalizing, devastating to the families psychologically and financially, and side effects of treatments can last a lifetime, including a higher propensity toward other cancers later on.
We can do better. We must do better.
The U.S. for-profit health care system tends to engender a conflict of interest with preventive measures versus enhanced treatments: the latter generates profit, the former eliminates it.
“We have enough information now to begin to explore ways in which to reduce children’s exposures which have been linked to increased risk for childhood leukemia”
OUR GOALS
Our goal is simple: to raise and direct funding to research collaboratives to empower their ability to find the causes of childhood leukemia and other cancers and distribute this information to the public with the ultimate goal of reducing the incidence of childhood cancer in a measurable and meaningful way.
Our primary partner is the Center for Integrative Research on Childhood Cancer and the Environment, or CIRCLE. CIRCLE is a Children’s Environmental Health and Disease Prevention Research Center jointly funded by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).