Cancer Newsletter

I spend a  lot of time reading about cancer, as you probably know (or you can probably tell). 

I get lots of stuff in my email inbox about cancer, some of which I asked for, and some of which I did not. (I was contacted by a public relations aggregator years ago. They send press releases to journalists and bloggers, and they asked if I wanted to be included. I said yes, so about 20 times a day I get an email from someone pushing a product or a story related to "health" in some way. Very occasionally, it's something useful. Mostly it isn't anything that I want to write about. But I do enjoy knowing what is being pushed when it comes to "health."

One thing that I did receive that has been useful and interesting is a newsletter called Breaking Cancer News. That title sounds fake, to be honest. I fully expected it to be a newsletter full of stories about one product that was really questionable. But the first time I received it, I spotted a name that let me know it was legitimate. 

The name was Jamie Reno, who is the editor of the newsletter. He's also a long-time journalist who used to write for Newsweek and Healthline and a whole lot of other publications. I know the name because he has also been diagnosed with Follicular Lymphoma about 22 years ago. He wrote a book called Hope Begins in the Dark, which tells the story of 50 patients who were diagnosed with Lymphoma. And if my memory is correct, he was an early user of RadioImmunoTherapy (RIT).

So if it's cancer-related, and Jamie Reno's name is on it, I feel like I can trust it.

I signed up to get Breaking Cancer News sent to me once a week, and I am enjoying it (as much as someone can enjoy reading about cancer). The stories are written with a general audience in mind, so they're easy to understand (unlike most of the stuff I link to in this blog). And the stories deal with current issues, as the name of the newsletter suggests. Not necessarily about things like FDA approvals or clinical trials. More about issues that affect all patients, caregivers, and advocates.  

For example, in this week's issue, there's a short commentary from Jamie Reno about how politics is keeping a cancer funding initiative from being passed in Congress. Then there's a story on multi-drug resistance -- how cancer cells can find ways to survive multiple treatments, and what researchers are trying to do about it. And finally there's a story on some of the latest developments in cancer prevention and detection. 

None of this is about Follicular Lymphoma, specifically, but it does provide some interesting context on the larger issues that affect cancer patients and researchers. I like the big picture it provides me.

The header on the newsletter says it was developed in partnership with the organization Teen Cancer America, which focuses on helping young people who have been diagnosed. And the newsletter's tag line is "Plain talk about what's hot and hopeful in the cancer arena -- for young people and anyone else who's listening." But don't be fooled -- there's good stuff in there for all of us.

I don't have any affiliation with the newsletter or the organization that sponsors it. I've been reading it for a few months now, and it seemed like something worth sharing. I hope you'll find it interesting.