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:
“What is most interesting and valuable in it, however, is not the materials for the history of Pontiac, or Braddock, or the Northwest, which it furnishes; not the annals of the country, but the natural facts, or perennials, which are ever without date. When out of history the truth shall be extracted, it will have shed its dates like withered leaves.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“It’s not the sentiments of men which make history but their actions.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)
“History is the present. That’s why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth.”
—E.L. (Edgar Lawrence)