During an ad break for The Last Leg on Channel 4 on Friday 5th September this ad premiered...
It's Payback Time - Stand Up to Cancer Trailer - Channel 4 (2014)
What an angle to take. For years (as far as there been charity ad campaigns against cancer) all cancer awareness ads had only been (like all other diseases) about the victims. They had been mostly somber in tone, like this one...
Mirrors - Cancer Research UK ad (2000s)
But within the past decade (as survival rates for cancer have increased dramatically) that tone has become more positive...
Birthday - The American Cancer Society ad (late-2000s)
Even threatening (for sentient cancer cells)....'Cancer, we're coming to get you' - Cancer Research UK Race for Life TV ad (2013)
In fact, if you look at the many ads covering the subject, cancer is quite an unique cause when it comes to how its advertised, Think about it. Can you think of any other medical condition who's awareness campaign includes reviving famous victims, such as the British comedian Bob Monkhouse.
Bob Monkhouse Prostate Cancer ad (2007)
The reason for this tiny exploration in advertising is that (if you haven't heard what the most recent crop of cancer ads have been saying) is that by the time of writing the number of people surviving cancer and dying from cancer has now about equaled. This means that if you (hopefully not) discover a lump somewhere or have a doctor give you the bad news, the chances of you not been killed by it are (generally) about 50:50 (please note that this is a gross generalization and that the survival rates of various forms of cancer vary - with much with the odds in your (living) favor).
But there is room for improvement. A "one size fits all" treatment is still a bit far away. But this is a too negative point of view. More positive view is this....
The fact that cancer has become the big killer and (as a result) the big health concern as it is now is a sign of progress. A century earlier, infectious diseases (Such as TB, malaria and flu) were the biggest killers. Cancer was rarely heard of (except in freak shows, where the few who did and developed huge sightly growths due to lack of treatment could earn a living). This is mostly because of the increase in life expectancy due to advances in health and medicine in the past century. Without them, not many people would have lived long enough for the tiny mutations caused by lifestyle choices (such as smoking) or environmental factors (such as the presence of asbestos) to turn the subject cells into uncontrollably-multiplying units that contribute nothing to the body except take up space and choke it, like junk in a spare room. You know them better as "tumors."
That's the high school biologist in me there speaking.
In conclusion, I do hope cancer becomes a history lesson one day. Its a condition that (on the looks of it) shouldn't happen to any organism. It is an effect caused by a spanner been thrown into the fundamental mechanism of life - DNA. The more we can do to stop that spanner from doing its damage (or deal with the carnage it causes) the better for us all.
But on a lighter note, I love the ad I started this post with. It is truly original in angle (form the cancer cell's point of view) and its execution (the cancer treatment is the cause of the end of (their) world).
It's Armageddon time... for cancer.
