On December 12 and 13, 2009 and on Feb. 2, 2010, Senator John McCain made a series of comments during open debate on the floor of the United States Senate and on a Fox News broadcast protesting against $665,000 in earmark funding issued to the motility center at Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. This funding is being used to assist in funding innovative GI motility research by Cedars Sinai to study the use of various antibiotics to enhance GI motility and prevent severe bacterial overgrowth in various GI motility diseases.

Such public and thoughtless comments saying that government funding of motility research is "crazy" and comparing it to the Federal Government paying for a Super Bowl commercial only serve to grow an unnecessary ignorance of the severity of GI motility disease and the destructive and life threatening impact such disease causes to patients and their families and friends.

We seek to meet with Senator McCain to gain a better understanding as to why he persists with such comments; having been a skin cancer sufferer we would expect Mr. McCain to have a better understanding of the struggle that chronic disease sufferers have to live a normal life, maintaining careers, families and health.

We also implore others in public life to work to help in our fight to gain further understanding, awareness and most importantly cures of GI motility disease that all too often causes pain and starvation to individuals who did not seek such illness and who did not choose this fight.

Please stand with us and against the forces of ignorance when we present this petition to Senator McCain's office in Washington on March 8, 2010.