Staff from the Division of Population Medicine, the School of Pharmacy and Centre for Trials Research are dusting off their sportswear and donning their trainers to raise much needed funds for Blood Cancer UK as part of the Baton 4 Cancer initiative. The COVID-19 pandemic has hit charities hard financially and our team are focussed on raising much needed funds for Partners without whom much of our research at Cardiff University would be very difficult. 

A forecast by University College London suggests that nearly 20 000 more patients could die from cancer in the next year because of lack of treatment during the coronavirus lockdown. Therefore, throughout the month of June a team of 10 of us will be exercising for a total of 20,000 minutes. Everyone will complete 2000 minutes of exercise which, if done daily, equates to 66 minutes per day. For the most we will be going solo with our exercise or we will be exercising with our families. However, we hope to meet once a week throughout our June challenge to complete one socially distanced exercise session as a collective. We will be jogging, running, walking, cycling, HIIT-ing, yoga-ing amongst other things in order to achieve our mammoth 20,000-minute target.

The reason we have chosen Blood Cancer UK as our chosen charity for the Baton 4 Cancer initiative is that Blood Cancer UK provides crucial funding for important research at Cardiff University. In addition to this one of our team sadly lost their Dad to Non Hodgkins Lymphoma in the middle of the COVID-19  pandemic.  

Our team consists of:

Haroon Ahmed, Emma Matthews, Holly Peters, Leigh Sanyaolu, David Gillespie, Lisa Hurt, Efi Mantzourani, Becca Milton, Rebecca Cannings-John and Tim Pickles.

Keep up with our progress through our twitter page @baton4cancer

So come on guys, what are you waiting for. Dig deep, empty those pockets and hopefully one day together we will beat blood cancer!