Last year more than 7,500 people were diagnosed with oral cancer in the UK. In just a decade the disease has grown by a third, and of all the advances there have been in battling cancer, it is one of the few cancers that is actually predicted to increase. Of course there are several risk factors that are heavily linked to the disease, such as smoking, but oral cancer can affect anyone. Mouth cancer takes more than 2000 lives every year, more than testicular and cervical cancer, even more than road traffic incidents.
The Oral Health Foundation campaign all year round in effort to raise awareness and battle mouth cancer. During November they run Mouth Cancer Action Month - a month long event which aims to raise awareness of mouth cancer and make a difference by saving thousands of lives through early detection and prevention. This is the campaign's twelfth year running and over those years they have made an incredible difference. The Oral Health Foundation have directly invested £270,000 into promoting oral cancer awareness, along side the 350 specialised events around the UK specifically set out to screen people for oral cancer, and the 250,000 people that now wear their blue ribbon badge to actively show support for the cause. This special month has increased the awareness of mouth cancer hugely, more than 1,000 related articles have been published reaching in excess of 150 million people.
The foundation this year has created a social campaign in effort to raise awareness throughout online social networks. It is called the 'Blue Lip Selfie Campaign', and is exactly what it says on the box! People all over the nation are taking a selfie with blue lips (animations, plastic lips or blue lipstick) then sharing it across social networks and uploading to www.bluelipselfie.co.uk, hash tagging #BlueLipSelfie. Blue is the colour of choice as it is the campaign's colour, along with their blue ribbons. We gave it a go ourselves and here's what we got!
So what have we done for Mouth Cancer Action month? Being Dental suppliers we could not support the cause enough. To address the issue we especially bought in a new product, the Identafi unit, a hand piece capable of accurately screening for mucosal abnormalities such as oral cancer or premalignant dysplasia that may not be apparent to the naked eye.
This tool will help to detect the disease as early as possible. Using three wavelengths of light the Identafi unit dramatically enhances the appearance of suspicious tissue revealing mucosal abnormalities which may lead to oral cancer or premalignant dysplasia. It is critical that we try to detect oral cancer as soon as possible, as it has one of the highest death rates amongst all cancers. Primarily due to the fact it is continuously identified at a late stage. Studies show that early detection increases the 5-year survival rate for oral cancer from 32 to 83 percent. During Mouth Cancer Action Month 10% of all our profits on the Indentafi unit will be donated towards the Oral Health Foundation.
