The Oral Cancer Foundation in the States is starting to make some serious headway in the awareness campaign to make people sit up and take notice of the need for early detection of Oral, Head and Neck cancers. Hell, look what early detection did for me! Leveraging the good work of the Head and Neck Cancer Alliance’s ‘walks’ organized around the free screening program that is being promoted for a week in April, this year from April 12th ’til the 18th (2010), they are aggressively targeting the broad spectrum of the population who just don’t get it, but might. Now that sounds a bit mean… it isn’t that they don’t get it, per se, but they don’t understand that the risk of contracting an oral, head or neck cancer is no longer limited to those using tobacco or alcohol. Step through these videos: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dvmRCcpnJM and then try the ones on this page: http://www.oralcancer.org/multimedia/index.htm . Hmmm… maybe you should do them in the reverse order.In any event, there needs to be more participation during this awareness push from the cancer centres around North America, and Canada in particular. So far, I can only find three centres in Canada that have jumped on this particular bandwagon: The Nova Scotia Head and Neck Cancer Team in Halifax, the London Health Sciences Centre in Ontario, and Vancouver Coastal Health in BC. Our American counterparts have 156 centres signed up… the rest of the world has 26.
Now, if I can just figure out how to get the firm as involved in this one as they are in the Weekend to End Women’s Cancers….