Go Orange for Leukemia!

Remember when, last December, Facebook status updates started to be flooded with colors?  Even if the origin of the trend was unknown, and got too many people puzzled,  soon it became public that women were posting their bra’s color to raise awareness for Breast Cancer. It was simple, effective and it worked.

Today I started to notice a new trend on my Facebook timeline: Instead of profile pictures I started to see a orange square. That orange square is being used to raise awareness for Leukemia, a disease that affects children and adults alike.

According to Wikipedia, in 2000 approximately 256,000 children and adults around the world developed a form of leukemia, and 209,000 died from it. This represents about 3% of the almost seven million deaths due to cancer that year, and about 0.35% of all deaths from any cause. Of the sixteen separate sites the body compared, leukemia was the 12th most common class of neoplastic disease, and the 11th most common cause of cancer-related death.

About 245,000 people in the United States are affected with some form of leukemia, including those that have achieved remission or cure. Approximately 44,270 new cases of leukemia were diagnosed in the year of 2008 in the U.S.A. This represents 2.9% of all cancers (excluding simple basal cell and squamous cell skin cancers) in the United States, and 30.4% of all blood cancers.

Among children with some form of cancer, about a third have a type of leukemia, most commonly acute lymphoblastic leukemia. Only about 3% cancer diagnoses among adults are for leukemias, but because cancer is much more common among adults, more than 90% of all leukemias are diagnosed in adults.

The numbers speak for themselves. This week please go Orange!