Cancer? Never heard of it.

In this weeks, school newsletter, it was announced that several teachers will be part in the Relay for Life "to help raise awareness and money for cancer". Ignoring the grammatically questionable decisions in the sentence (one may wonder if cancer really needs the money), what gets to me is that I see this all the time. Some body is doing some thing to "raise awareness" of cancer.

Here's the thing: I think we're all pretty much aware of cancer by now.

I'm not sure who it is that cancer has on its PR team, but they've done a bang up job. Seriously, just today a Google News search on "cancer" brings up 108,979 results. In comparison, "Miley Cyrus" only finds 5,005 results, and I feel like I can't turn around without hearing %#$@ about her. (Side note: best result was "Miley Cyrus in no rush to have kids". Was this really a burning question?) So clearly cancer is getting the press it needs.

Maybe the concern is that cancer is being underrepresented in movies and television, so I did a keyword search on The Internet Movie Database, and lo and behold, we get 1690 titles that have in one way or another to do with cancer. A search on "death" yields 14,998 results, which is a lot more to be sure, but let's face it, it's less than ten times as many results, and death kills way more people than cancer.

As such, I think we can all take a deep breath and assume that no more needs to be done to make people aware of cancer. By all means, take action to raise money to fight it, support those afflicted by it, but rest assured that at this point we're all well aware of its presence. Maybe bring attention to those afflictions that don't get as much press. How about Cotard delusion, or alien hand syndrome? I'm thinking not a lot of people are aware of those. And let's not forget that right here at DLOG, we attempted to bring to light the suffering caused by FOH syndrome

People need your help - those pectoral implants aren't cheap you know.