History
The idea for the charity grew by chance, out of the eagerness of a group of women to organise a fashion show to fund a children's intensive care heart unit at Guy's Hospital, London. Established in 1990, the charity’s work has expanded dramatically. As well as an Education and Awareness team with a schools programme providing information, education and advice that reaches pupils all over the UK, the charity funds and organises a forum for professionals to ensure information and best practice sharing. It sponsors a teenage conference, Find Your Sense of Tumour, an International Conference on Cancer and the Adolescent and have just appointed the world’s first Professor of Adolescent Cancer Medicine.
Each day in the UK, 6 teenagers will find out they have cancer. That is over 2,200 new diagnoses each year. In many cases, cancer in teens is not picked up early enough and symptoms are dismissed as growing pains or sports injuries. Because teenagers are undergoing growth spurts, their cancers grow faster than other age groups and they can be at greater risk.
Cancer is the most common cause of non-accidental death in teens and young adults in the UK. By the age of 15 teens have a 1 in 600 chance of developing cancer. By the age of 24 young adults will have had a 1 in 285 chance of developing cancer. In the last 30 years the incidence of cancer in the teenage and young adult group has increased by 50% and for the first time ever, the number of teens with cancer now exceeds the number of children with cancer.
Read more about this topic: Teenage Cancer Trust
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of mankind interests us only as it exhibits a steady gain of truth and right, in the incessant conflict which it records between the material and the moral nature.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“If man is reduced to being nothing but a character in history, he has no other choice but to subside into the sound and fury of a completely irrational history or to endow history with the form of human reason.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“The thing that struck me forcefully was the feeling of great age about the place. Standing on that old parade ground, which is now a cricket field, I could feel the dead generations crowding me. Here was the oldest settlement of freedmen in the Western world, no doubt. Men who had thrown off the bands of slavery by their own courage and ingenuity. The courage and daring of the Maroons strike like a purple beam across the history of Jamaica.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)