Charity launches national mouth cancer campaign by urging everybody to be mouthaware

More than 130 people from across 98 organisations were in attendance and heard from a range of speakers reinforcing the need for greater recognition of mouth cancer and its signs and symptoms.

Sir Paul Beresford MP, the event’s parliamentary sponsor, brought the room to order and used his introductory speech to talk about the “vast improvements in prevention” in recent times in combatting risk factors like smoking and alcohol, and through the introduction of the HPV vaccination.

The Oral Health Foundation’s Chief Executive Nigel Carter OBE spoke about the devastating rise of mouth cancer in the United Kingdom.

Nigel said, “The sad fact is that the number of mouth cancer cases continues to increase year on year. When we took on this campaign nearly two decades ago, we were looking at just over 3,000 cases each year. In the last year or so, we have had over 8,300 recognised cases of mouth cancer. That is a huge increase, and it is one of the few cancers where the number of cases has started to increase.