While I am very much in favor of anything that will rise awareness of our disease, when all this was being decided two years ago, both OCF and the Mouth Cancer Foundation our sister org in the UK asked that it be in one of our two months which already have a huge following in major markets. But since this has surgical organizations engaged in putting this on, they had their own idea. Actually that statement is not true - it has TWO organizations putting it on, and they have made a little world publicity for it. But no other organizations in any of the European countries have bought in for instance. This is so typical. They wanted something unique to them.

You would think we could all pull together for something to make a bigger noise, but this is getting no press anywhere of consequences. While I find it disappointing, I have worked with the surgical H&N group off and on for many years and I have found they have their own ideas. If they got good buy in on this from other surgical groups around the world, it would be great but they did not, and they got no buy in from the many advocacy groups out there like OCF....because they didn't ask any of them to be engaged. Had we not reached out to them we would have had no discussion of it at all. But at the end of the day these are just two organizations using the word WORLD when it is far from it. I hope it does some good, but their words are big, however their vision of what something like this could be was myopic.