“I’m not waiting for my son to relapse before he receives treatment,” Hannah Oliver-Willets, mum to four-year-old Zac Oliver.
A very special world-record attempt will take place in Telford, Shropshire, this weekend to help raise money for potentially life-saving treatment for the only child in the UK with a rare form of cancer.
Near Haploid Acute Lymphoblastic Leukaemia affects just 0.5 per cent of children in the world – and little Zac Oliver, age four, from Broseley in Shropshire, is the only child who has it in the UK.
With treatment options in the UK at an end, his family and small local community has managed to raise a staggering £300k in just eight weeks to help pay for potentially life-saving treatment in the USA – with almost £100,000 of that coming in just five days.
But Zac’s family now have just weeks left to raise the remaining £200,000 – otherwise the youngster will be too ill to travel for the CAR-T therapy that could give him a 25 per cent chance of survival.
A festival has been organised this weekend in his name. Organisers are hoping ZACFEST, in Telford, will kick off with hundreds of people dancing and singing to Baby Shark to catapult them into the record books – the current record stands at 441 people.
So far, people have held hundreds of separate fundraising events including barge pulls, sponsored walks and runs, cake sales, auctions, world-record breaking attempts, discos – even a guess the weight of the cabbage competition.
And more than 90 schools and 160 businesses joined a ‘Wear red for Zac’ day last week, which also received backing from Premier League club Wolverhampton Wanderers, footballer Jermain Defoe, and Countdown’s Rachel Riley amongst others.
Donations have come in from as far afield as New Zealand, America and Vietnam.
- Anyone who wants to support the fundraising campaign should visit justgiving.com/crowdfunding/zac-oliver
- People can also join Zac’s Facebook support page which is called ‘Zachariah’s’s fight against Acute Lymphoblastic Leukaemia‘.
- People can also donate using their mobile phone by texting ZACH75 £1 to 70070.