HJNO Jul/Aug 2021

INSIDE LOUISIANA’S WAR ON CANCER 30 JUL / AUG 2021 I  HEALTHCARE JOURNAL OF NEW ORLEANS not know the answer to that question defin- itively today. It stands to reason, though, that if screening services were either not available or patients forewent their annual screening because of concerns of COVID, that that should, in concept, result in later stage diagnoses at some later date. But we don’t know that today, and it will probably be a few years before we have enough data to conclusively say that, yes, during this period, we saw more later-stage disease than we otherwise would have. Editor Were/are immunocompromised patients receiving cancer care encouraged to receive the COVID-19 vaccine? Fontenot The standing recommendation fromour medical oncologists to our patients has been to get the COVID-19 vaccine. We have encouraged patients who have con- cerns or questions or just want to talk it through with their doctor to do so, to get in touch with their oncologists and even come in for a visit and have a conversation about it, because it is important. What we know about COVID is that it’s most significant in terms of poor outcomes for people who are elderly or ill, and in many cases, those categories fit our cancer patients, so, we want, and encourage, as many of our can- cer patients to get vaccinated as possible. Editor Were patients who tested COVID-19 positive able to continue treatment at your facility? Fontenot We developed specialized proto- cols exactly for that circumstance, because in many types of oncology therapies, it’s dif- ficult or impossible to pause or stop treat- ment in the middle without compromising the outcome. With most cancer treatments, you can’t put in a little now and a little later and a little next year and have a good out- come. It’s like a course of a prescription medication — whatever’s on the label, you need to take it every day until it’s done. The same is true of most oncology therapies. We knew very early on with the COVID outbreak, when we knew our patients would probably start to test positive, that we needed to have a strategy to be able to continue to treat them under an active COVID diagnosis. So, we put together a protocol very early on, which would allow us to do that, and we treated a number of COVID-positive patients in our clinics and departments throughout the course of the pandemic. Editor Do you think the war on cancer will ever be won in humans? Or should we try for peaceful coexistence? Fontenot Oh, no. Peaceful coexistence is not an option, because there is no peaceful coexistence with cancer. As long as cancer is present, it is going to negatively trans- form and impact people, so there can be no peaceful coexistence with cancer. I am opti- mistic that given enough time and expertise and developments and applications of tech- nology, we will find our way to mitigating or reducing the role of cancer to a nuisance, if not avoiding it entirely. I am very optimis- tic about that prospect. I don’t know if it’ll happen in my lifetime, but I know, given the progress we’ve been able to make over the last several decades, given the amount of exceptionally brilliant people who are investigating solutions to these problems, that we are eventually going to eliminate cancer as a problem from our society. n Terrebonne General Health System, Mary Bird Perkins Cancer Center Providers