On the 4th of February we celebrate Cancer Day worldwide. The purpose of this day is to raise awareness while also taking action against cancer. It all began exactly on the 4th of February, 2000, at the World Summit Against Cancer for the New Millennium conference held in Paris. There, they discussed the need for unified actions in order to at least improve the cancer crisis. This is how the Paris Charter was created. The most important aspects of it were to mobilise the global community against cancer, to raise awareness to people’s ignorance, to promote research and to improve patient services. World Cancer Day was an initiative of the UICC with the sole purpose of helping cancer patients and raising awareness. The Union for International Cancer Control is an organisation founded in Switzerland in 1933. It is the largest and oldest organisation dedicated to this cause and has over 1000 member organisations all around the world. Here, in our country, we have 6 of them.
World Cancer Day has had various themes throughout the years. Starting from 2009 to 2010, the slogan was I love my healthy active childhood, talking about how we should be healthy as children, in order to minimise health risks as adults. From 2010 to 2012 their main focus was preventing the disease, creating slogans like Together let’s do something and Cancer can be prevented. Up until 2015, the emphasis was on educating people about the battle between reality and myths regarding this illness. Then the themes became more motivational, such as Not Beyond Us, We can. I can., I Am and I Will and Close the care gap. This trend lasted until 2024. Starting this 4th of February up until 2027, we are United by Unique.
These themes represent the most difficult obstacles that cancer patients face on a daily basis, such as being discriminated against for being ill, for being different, for having scars, for being bald due to chemotherapy, for losing hope and being depressed, for being unable to afford the highly expensive treatments, for having no one beside them, for having no will to live.
This organization was formed to help with the problems that people whose lives are forever changed by this illness face every day. Everything from their appearance to their personality changes.
We celebrate World Cancer Day because it raises awareness among non-patients. This is why we need to educate ourselves and understand that it is a real life problem that affects all of us to some degree.
We all know cancer is a disease. Our bodies are made of trillions of cells, which means cancer can start anywhere. Through the cell division, cells grow and multiply, forming new cells to meet the body’s needs. The old and possibly damaged cells die later on, allowing the freshly built cells to operate in their place. During this process, damaged or abnormal cells sometimes undergo division and grow and multiply when they shouldn’t. This can form a tumor, which is a lump of tissue that can be either cancerous or non-cancerous.
The cancerous one can travel almost everywhere in the human body to form new tumors, a process called metastasis, while the non-cancerous tumor can be removed and won’t regenerate. Cancerous tumors are hard to eliminate because once they are in your system, they keep reappearing and multiplying.
What types of cancer are there?
There are over 200 types of cancer. Why? This happens due to the fact that we have many different cells, and cancer can start in any one of them. We can classify them by the organs they affect, such as lung cancer, or by the type of cell from which they originate. For example, some types of cancer do not form tumors, such as blood cancers, like leukemias.
What stages of cancer are there?
The stages are divided into 2 types. Firstly, we have the 4 stages of cancer, which describe how much the tumor has spread and its size, increasing from 1 to 4. These stages are noted with Roman numerals.
Secondly, we have a more complex system called the TNM staging system.
T – the size of the cancer and how much it has spread into the nearby tissue, being noted with numbers from 1 to 4.
N – describes whether there are cancer cells in the network of glands throughout the body being noted with numbers from 0 to 3.
M – describes the metastasis being noted with the numbers 0 and 1.
Some examples: T2N1M0 and T4N3M1 – the second one is more dangerous and harder to treat.
This is why there are different types of so-called “cures”. If the cancer is localised, it might be removed with surgery or radiotherapy. If it’s more advanced, doctors might need to resort to other methods, such as chemotherapy, hormone therapy, immunotherapy and/or targeted cancer drugs. The stages indicate the severity of the cancer and based on that, doctors identify the right treatment.
What is the difference between February Cancer Month and the one in October?
Due to the fact that World Cancer Day is celebrated on the 4th of February, the whole month aims to raise awareness. October is also a cancer awareness month, which is more known. The difference is that October raises awareness for breast cancer, while February does so for every one of the 200+ types that exist.
The help that we can provide, as people who have no idea how hard it is to be a cancer patient, doesn’t always boil down to money. We can also spread awareness and get people on the right side of the truth about cancer. Worldwide, cancer is the second cause of death, which is terrifying. This is why we need to take action. Nowadays, it’s not as difficult, because we have social media! Sometimes all we need to do is a few clicks to teach people what is right and what isn’t.
