This is Michael. September is Children's cancer Awareness Month, and today is the first day of September.
Since Cannon was diagnosed with Stage 4 neuroblastoma in 2013, I have set a personal goal of posting one fact about children's cancer per day throughout the month of September. We will do it again this year, and every day this month I will try to educate and raise awareness to those of you that have been gracious and kind enough to follow Cannon’s fight against cancer, and join Cannonball Kids’ cancer and our ongoing efforts to fund research so that someday cancer will not be diagnosed in children.
Children's cancer Awareness Fact of the Day:
The incident rate of cancer in children over the last 20 years has not decreased. In fact, the number of children being diagnosed with cancer has risen over 20% in the last 20 years. That means that per 1,000 children, 200 more per 1,000 are being diagnosed today than were being diagnosed in the 1990's.
Quite a shocking statistic. How can that really be? Why? Why are almost all adult diseases and nearly all adult cancers being diagnosed in smaller rates over the past 10 and 20 years, but children's cancer is actually rising as a disease rate in our children? It's a rhetorical question really... the answer, of course, is because more funding of research, early detection and improved therapies has been directed to adult forms of disease rather than our kids. And despite those in the medical world that would argue and say otherwise, and attempt to take a statistical percentage and try to say otherwise (mostly because it is just shameful how little is directed to children's diseases and it is an embarrassment to the medical community), it is just plain fact. How many more children have to continue to suffer and die because of the lack of early detection methods? How many more families must bury a child before therapies are developed specifically for children? How many more trips to Washington, DC and our State Houses must occur before we fund enough research to determine why our children are being diagnosed with cancers earlier and at a 20% higher rate than in the 1970's, 80's and 90's??
Go Gold in September. Wear a gold ribbon on your lapel, a gold scarf, a gold ribbon. Make a goal to tell one person a day about children's cancer, and the devastation to families worldwide that unjustly lose a child to a form of pediatric cancer. I have now met and know far too many that have buried a child... how wrong. Join Melissa, Ashley, Rich, Debra and me from Cannonball Kids' cancer Foundation, and all those worldwide in our effort to raise awareness to these issues and raise funding for research to rid our world of cancers being diagnosed in infants, toddlers, children and teenagers.
St. Peregrine, pray for all the kids that will be diagnosed with a form of pediatric cancer today, and for the souls of the children who will die from a form of pediatric cancer today, and especially for all those souls that have been unjustly and needlessly lost to children's cancer.