1 November 2005
Dundee Joins in National Mouth Cancer Awareness Week
The terrible toll reaped by mouth cancer will be illustrated in a number of events staged by University of Dundee Dental School to mark National Mouth Cancer Awareness Week, which runs from November 13th to 19th.
Professor Graham Ogden, in the Unit of Oral Surgery and Oral Medicine at the Dental School, will give a graphic talk to pupils at the city’s Baldragon Academy as part of the activities aimed at raising awareness of mouth cancer.
There will also be dedicated displays in the Dental Hospital and an initiative run at Dundee University Students’ Association highlighting the increase in the occurrence of mouth cancer, particularly among young people in Scotland.
Primary causes of the disease include smoking and excessive alcohol consumption.
"Whilst the majority of people know that cancer can arise in the mouth and that smoking is implicated, few realise the association with excessive alcohol consumption," said Professor Ogden.
"At a time when oral cancer incidence is rising, particularly in Scotland where oral cancer rates are twice that of the rest of the UK, this incentive raises the awareness.
"The incidence of oral cancer within the UK continues to rise, and has doubled over the last 20 years. There is also a trend towards an increase in younger people, although the majority are still over the age of 50.
"This campaign adds to the other initiatives in Scotland, such as the Ben Walton Trust (http://www.benwaltontrust.org/) and the Scottish Oral Cancer Action Group, that have sought to raise public and professional awareness of oral cancer. In the meantime, efforts to reduce exposure to the two most important aetiological agents (tobacco and alcohol) combined with a healthy diet of fresh fruit and fresh vegetables, remains the most important message in the prevention of oral cancer."
Professor Ogden is one of 200 oral and facial surgeons around the UK who will drop their scalpels for a moment to go into schools and take the message direct to schoolchildren, particularly on the effects of smoking.
Smoking causes mouth cancer. These surgeons who specialise in the treatment of mouth cancer will go into their local secondary schools and show 12 to 13 year old pupils vivid pictures of young patients with mouth cancer. They will tell the stories of these patients in a 15-minute school assembly and how having this disease has destroyed the lives of these patients and their families.
Earlier research suggests that using oral and facial surgeons talking directly to school pupils about mouth cancer could be the most effective way of discouraging children from taking up smoking because this cancer is the most visually disfiguring of cancers - it destroys patients’ faces.
Young people are more concerned about how they look and are more frightened of being disfigured by mouth cancer than being short of breath with lung and heart disease as a result of smoking. They also believe doctors more than their teachers or ordinary health promotion workers when it comes to information about the effects of smoking.
The week-long campaign has been organised by The British Association of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeons and Saving Faces - The Facial Surgery Research Foundation (FSRF).
For more information contact:
Roddy Isles,
Head of Press
Tel: 01382 344910,
out of hours: 07968298585,
Email: r.isles@dundee.ac.uk | 
