April is all about awareness for East Alabama Medical Center.
The EAMC Cancer Center is dedicating April to an awareness campaign for head and neck cancer.
"With head and neck cancer, three of the big culprits for that are cigarettes and alcohol and the HPV virus," said Marty Brice, EAMC nurse. "Those are the three things we see in a younger population."
Head and neck cancer patients often lose their ability to swallow and sometimes lose their taste buds, Brice said.
"A bowl of ice cream, a beer--it's all the same," Brice said. "There's no taste left."
Brice said a physician in Birmingham wrote a cookbook with recipes to stimulate patients' taste buds and help them swallow. For the awareness campaign, plans are in the works for a dinner with him in April.
Brice said although it will not happen this year, the EAMC medical staff hopes to bring free screenings to campus next year.
"If somebody's had a persistent cough, or they've got a soreness in their mouth, or maybe there's an ulcer area that hasn't gone away, oftentimes that is a cancer that nobody realizes it is," Brice said.
According to the Head and Neck Cancer Alliance, the United States sees 40,000 cases per year with 400,000 cases worldwide.
Tobacco use, including both cigarettes and smoke-free products, causes 85 percent of cases.
"With smoking and dipping, No. 1, don't do it," said Fred Kam, director of the Medical Clinic. "No. 2, if you've done it and done it for years, you want to have preventive checkups to make sure you're not showing any kinds of signs or evidence of head and neck cancer."
Many people are unaware of another cause of head and neck cancer: human papillomavirus.
"Human papilloma virus is a group of viruses that is still being studied," Kam said. "They cause things like warts, which you can have on any part of your body. It's also considered to be the No. 1 cause of cervical cancer, and now it's been directly associated with head and neck cancers."
HPV can be transmitted through oral sex.
"Many young people do not think oral sex is sex because they're not actually having intercourse," Brice said. "They do not realize that if somebody has HPV, they can pass it on, and you get the warts in your throat."
Condoms have proved to be less effective in preventing the spread of HPV than HIV, Kam said.
"We can't say that that's necessarily a good preventive method," Kam said. "Avoidance is really the key."
Brice said awareness is important for a college-aged audience.
"We're seeing an increased incidence of head and neck cancer in younger people," he said. "We think it's going back to the lifestyles they're choosing--the tobacco, the alcohol."
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