Oral Cancer Foundation

04/16/2026

As we celebrate the 12th year of the DMV Oral Cancer Walk, we want to extend our heartfelt thanks to all of our sponsors for their generous support and commitment to this important cause.

We offer a very special thank you to The Hoffmans and Megan Blair, whose dedication, compassion, and support helped shape this walk into what it is today. Their ongoing involvement has made a lasting impact on our community and on the fight against oral cancer.

This year, we are especially honored to recognize their support in tribute to their beloved son, Peter McGee Hoffman. His memory continues to inspire this event and reminds us why awareness, education, and support matter so deeply.

Thank you to everyone who stands with us in raising awareness and making a difference. Together, we walk with purpose, love, and hope.

04/06/2026

Listen to our latest podcast featuring Roseann Murphy talking about her mom's battle with oral cancer and the fundraiser in memory of her.

Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0cBqqFETr0CXtWhkb9P1dh?si=EcjypshmSzOk4_Yz6TJvjA

Event Info:
https://tinyurl.com/2ex2xbz7

04/01/2026

In Memoriam: Brian Hill
Co-Founder of the Oral Cancer Foundation and a Lifelong Advocate for Patients, Survivors, and Families

“Brian believed no one should face oral cancer alone. His legacy will live on through the lives he touched, the community he built, and the mission that continues in his honor.”

The Oral Cancer Foundation mourns the passing of Brian Hill, our co-founder and a tireless advocate for patients, survivors, and families affected by oral cancer.

Together with his late wife, Ingrid Hill, Brian founded the Oral Cancer Foundation with a mission grounded in compassion, education, advocacy, and support. What began as a deeply personal commitment grew into a lasting source of hope and guidance for countless individuals navigating one of life’s most difficult challenges.

Brian devoted much of his life to ensuring that people affected by oral cancer would never have to face the disease alone. Through the online support community at oralcancersupport.org, he helped create a trusted space where patients and caregivers could ask questions, share experiences, find encouragement, and connect with others who truly understood what they were going through. For many, that community became a lifeline.

His work was defined not only by dedication but by humanity. Brian understood that oral cancer affects far more than just physical health. He recognized the fear, uncertainty, and emotional burden that often come with diagnosis and treatment, and he gave his time, energy, and heart to helping others move through those realities with dignity and support.

Brian’s legacy lives on in the foundation he helped build, in the community he helped foster, and in the many lives he touched through his kindness, leadership, and unwavering service. His contributions to the oral cancer community will continue to be felt for years to come.

In honor of Brian’s life and mission, Chester Deitz will continue leading the foundation forward, building on the work Brian began with renewed dedication to expanding research funding, increasing public awareness through community walks, and developing patient materials for those affected by oral cancer. This continued commitment reflects the values Brian championed and ensures that his vision for education, support, and advocacy will endure.

We extend our deepest condolences to all who knew and loved Brian. We honor his life with profound gratitude and remain committed to carrying forward the mission he helped create.

Brian Hill will be remembered with respect, admiration, and lasting appreciation for the difference he made in the lives of so many. His legacy will endure through every patient supported, every family informed, and every step taken in the fight against oral cancer.

03/04/2026

“This is my tongue cancer story.
It changed my body.
It changed my voice.
It changed me.
Survival was only the beginning.
Now I am rebuilding.
If you are rebuilding too, I see you.”
-

02/03/2026

Thank you for your continued support of public education and published research.

01/22/2026

The databases that collect cancer information in the US have been updated. The HARD DATA is in for 2021-2022. Yes, I know that was 4 years ago, but the data always lags reality by about four years. It is a difficult collection of complex data, compiled from different sources, that would be assembled by any other means. The important thing about cancer data is not a single year number, but TREND LINES in the data. The upward trend lines in oral and oropharyngeal cancers remain unchanged from my early years at OCF, and projections indicate this will continue to increase in incidence for most of our lifetimes. I have always believed that some of this is alterable, if not in our generation, in our children’s. But much has to change for that to occur. You should be aware that this is a raw batch of data, and interpreting it and parsing it to get any given number can be done in many different ways. The main database is called the SEER database, kept by the National Cancer Institute (NCI). SEER stands for surveillance, epidemiology, and end results, or essentially what happened, what caused it, and what was the ultimate outcome. More on this further down the post. The other is the National Cancer Registry.

The Oral Cancer Foundation makes an annual prediction of the incidence of oral and oropharyngeal cancers in the US. If you compare our findings to those of others who also calculate this, we are all very similar. I will say this, the way the data are collected does not allow you to know that XX, X26 people are going to have something occur, say an occurrence or a death. The math comes out that way, but the data is not accurate to single digits, probably not to even tens. So we round the final math calculated number. It yields a number you can easily remember, and in the end, it’s not exactly knowable to the single-digit level. This year, the number has increased again, and OCF estimates that 59,600 Americans will be newly diagnosed with oral or oropharyngeal cancer in 2026. Almost 12,750 individuals will die from this cancer in 2026, also an increase over last year. The foundation has been issuing estimates since 2002, and, with a retrospective eye, we have been very accurate. When I started OCF around 1999, the annual incidence rate had held steady for many decades at about 30,000 people. Today we are at 58,500. I find these numbers sobering and sad. Much has changed to cause this, and much needs to be done to reduce these numbers. Many mechanisms to improve this are available to us today, but they are poorly implemented. In this post, I would like you to understand these numbers and how they are collected, so that you have confidence in their validity. In a future post, I will address the reasons we are doing so poorly at bringing this number at least to a plateau, and the obstacles to eventually seeing it reduced.

First, here is an overview of cancer in the US. If you think that we track all cancers in the US, all individuals who get cancer, and ultimately what happens to them, you would be wrong. Understanding the enormity of the idea will make it clear why it is done the way that it is. With a population of about 342 million individuals at the end of 2023, it is estimated that somewhere slightly over 2 million Americans will be newly diagnosed with cancer this year. That is a new record. That number does NOT include most skin cancers (squamous cell and basal cell carcinomas), nor very early findings of carcinoma in situ. About 620,000 deaths will be caused by cancer in America, or about 1,675 people a day. At the end of the year (based on 2022 data), we had access to numbers on survivorship, which can be parsed by cancer type and stage from the dataset, again yielding a best estimate. The number of Americans who have survived a cancer or are currently in treatment is estimated to be about 18.1 million. Cancer is the second most common cause of death in the US, exceeded only by heart disease.

A system that would tell us about every case, covering this large a data set of people, does not exist, and we have no accurate mechanism for collecting such data. What we do is collect data from representative areas of the country and extrapolate (a sophisticated best guess) from that to a national number. The SEER network of institutions that report covers about 28% of the US population. The data collection sites are located in many different geographic locations, from rural to urban. But keep in mind that when you see different organizations report slightly different numbers, they are all estimates, as exact numbers are not knowable even in retrospect. These small differences result from differences in how some organizations sort the SEER data. When I calculate the OCF’s number, I use ALL incidences of the disease. The database can be parsed in an almost infinite number of ways, by years, by ethnicity, by gender, by age, by stage of disease, and much more. We do not split hairs unless we are looking at a particular age group or subpopulation. The number OCF is issuing today is drawn from “all comers,” with no distinctions based on race, age, gender, etc. Brian

https://oralcancerfoundation.org/annual-oral-cancer-numbers/

04/06/2024

Ingrid Hill, my wife of almost 40 loving and wonderful years, died suddenly and unexpectedly on April 1, 2024. Even today as I write this to inform people, I do so through constant tears, as I am days later, still in unbelieving shock of her passing. She was found on our kitchen floor by a neighbor, most likely the result of a sudden coronary or cerebral event. Given her life of healthy living, exercising, and eating, I am having a hard time accepting that these kinds of things happen to even the healthiest of individuals.

She was a woman of extraordinary compassion for others, and loved her work at the Oral Cancer Foundation which she cofounded with me in 1999 right after I came out of cancer treatment at MDACC. I don’t think that I would have survived those months of treatment and complications were it not for her support and constant care. I’m a terrible patient. She particularly liked helping the many family members or current patients of this same cancer who contacted OCF on the phone, and the many years as caretaker to me through more surgeries and treatments after my initial diagnosis plagued my life, gave her a wealth of practical advice and knowledge about the disease and coping with treatment side effects. She was very well versed and experienced to help them. Of course, she was also the backbone of the financial aspects of OCF, and a core part of the support team working directly with the many volunteers that help the foundation put on awareness/walk events around the country each year.

We met when we were both employed at a dental implant company in the earliest years of those becoming accepted treatment modalities. Meeting her I knew immediately that she would be part of my future life. She was a rare mixture of beauty, intelligence, emotional strengths and understandings, and a person who saw the good in everything. I fell short of equaling her in many of these areas. We became immediately inseparable and lived together for a few years before tying the knot. I decided to spin off from that company and start my own implant company, and Ingrid readily came with me to help run the new venture. We sold that implant company 7 years after starting it to a big pharma company. When the auditors came in to go over the operational, financial, and FDA records, they said they had never seen a company so well organized and documented. That was all her, not me.

She was adventurous, and things that dominated my personal life she quickly adapted to and made her own. Becoming a pilot, a certified SCUBA dive master, rock climber, skier of runs that I even shied away from, and so much more. She had no fear and would try anything, excelling and mastering it. On a cold very early morning, riding our two Harleys back to SoCal from Mammoth Mountain in Northern California on a deserted straight highway, I decided to roll on the throttle. I wanted to see what she would do. Speed increased past 100, hit 120 and still climbing, and there she was on her Harley right next to me calm and relaxed. She never would back down, and if I had kept increasing speed, I knew she would not slow down or back off. That’s the way she approached life. There was little that she would not try. There was little she did not conquer and master. We both loved flying, and aerobatics in particular. She would do spins until I was beyond any desire to do more. Throttling back to idle, letting a wing drop until the plane flipped over on its back and started spiraling around and around towards the ground. Then calmly entering the right control inputs to set things straight again, returning to normal flight.

When we were at OCF fundraisers with lots of A-list celebrities, she chatted with them as if they were old friends and had an encyclopedic knowledge of their lives and work in movies, stage, and other media that she prepped for. She easily won them over. Unlike me, she dressed the part of wherever she was. With them, she looked and spoke like them, and then there was me, the brown shoes at a formal event. She was a sight to behold. Drop dead gorgeous, but equally socially adept and comfortable. And she was all mine to be proud of. She attended tons of my lectures at universities around the country. She could do my technical science presentations after hearing them so many times as well as I could. She was a sponge for information. I often wondered how I was so lucky to have convinced her to marry me.

I could write a book about her, as there were so many facets to her life and experiences. But the most important thing was that she loved me unconditionally, and I can be a hard person to love at times. I have my passions and drives, and they can often take precedent in my life. But she always had my back, even if she thought I was off on a tangent. That is what loving partnerships are all about, and she epitomized the best of the possibilities. Her loss is leaving me feeling very alone, as the one constant in my adult life, my one completely safe place to be, the one who taught me what true love really is, she is now gone and absent from my world. I feel so alone now, absent her unwavering presence.

She was a rare and extraordinary spirit. A soul much more evolved than I, that understood her place and time in the universe. Now the atoms that spun around for an instant on the infinite timeline, that made up the blood and bones and sinew of the woman we knew as Ingrid, are disbanding and returning to the stars and seas from which they were born. While we all know this life will end, the suddenness of her departure is extremely painful. No time to prepare for the impeding, no warning that something was amiss. In the blink of an eye, she is gone. I know she had many friends via the foundation and personally. If you would like to know anything more, please feel free to reach out to me at my OCF address. She will be cremated this weekend, and her ashes scattered in a favorite place, where in my loneliness I might go and be able to talk to her. Lord knows there is much left unsaid, and I need to say the things to her which I did not get the opportunity to in life. Selfishly, going there and talking might eventually ease this huge emptiness that I feel, though I suspect it will always be a part of who I am now. I will wear her wedding band around my neck with a small vial of her ashes till my last day.

I hope you all remember her kindly, and know that she loved you all as well, and her work with many of you. In lieu of sending flowers, she and I would welcome donations in her memory to OCF, that the work she loved so dearly may carry on. Brian Hill

OCF funds life-saving research and work that elucidates mechanisms for early discovery and furthers disease understanding. We provide direct peer to peer support for oral cancer patients and their caregivers. We disseminate vetted professional and public information on oral and oropharyngeal cancer,...

04/02/2024

April 1st kicks off Oral Cancer Awareness Month!
I invite my entire FB community of friends and professionals to change your profile picture to the burgundy oral cancer picture you see here for the month of April. This is OCF's 6th year of asking for this simple effort, and each year hundreds more join with us. We hope that April this year sets new records. If you are a patient, a survivor, a caregiver-family member, you know personally how important this raising visibility of our cancer is. You know the physical and emotional pain this disease can bring into not just the patients world, but the entire family’s life. If you are a dental professional, a CDT, an RDH, an assistant… this is your profession's cancer. The American public counts on you to be the early discovery mechanism that will save their lives. I ask you to join the fight with full hearts to raise national awareness of a too often overlooked disease by turning Facebook burgundy for April.

OCF represents a disease that the American public is still very unaware of. That means that they do not know the risk factors which lead to it, some of which are avoidable; nor the signs and symptoms of it developing in themselves, which would facilitate self-referral to an appropriate medical or dental professional for diagnosis. Oral and oropharyngeal cancers are still found as a late stage disease the majority of the time because of this lack of awareness, and the lack of a national effort to engage in annual screenings. To those who will be touched by oral cancer, late staging at the time of discovery means significantly worse treatment related morbidity, and worse long-term outcomes. This cancer kills more individuals as a percentage of those that get it than cancers we hear about everyday. The treatments are brutal, and it destroys far too many lives each year. We must join together and give oral cancer a voice in order to save lives! The awareness of this disease must be increased. It’s only 30 days, and if your burgundy picture’s message impacts just one person in your circle of Facebook friends, if your friends copy your effort, it will potentially change someone’s life. Become Burgundy for April.

If you wish to go a step further, please send an email to those professionals you know and your friends asking them to join you in this simple effort by changing their picture for April. The future is not written in stone. The deadly statistics can be altered. Please join with those of us at the Oral Cancer Foundation in this simple effort to raise awareness.

01/04/2024

Please join us at our oral cancer walk in Clearwater, Florida on February 17th! Register today, and if you can't attend, consider making a donation directly to the walk. https://ocf.donordrive.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=donorDrive.event&eventID=849

12/20/2023

As we enter the end of the giving season, we face the ever-daunting task of figuring out how to fund being impactful in the coming year. Always improving includes:

Supporting more researchers in their endeavors.
Creating educational and early discovery programs and screening events.

Expanding our advocacy work to see the best trials get funded.

Attending and speaking at events that raise awareness of this ugly disease.

Oral cancer is not merciful. Too often, it takes a life even after protracted and invasive attempts to control it. Those who survive are tasked with living with the compromises and devastation of its aftermath.

This year, over 54,000 people in the United States will be newly diagnosed with a form of oral or oropharyngeal cancer, the largest category of the head and neck cancer group.

But we are fighting back. You are what makes that possible. If each one of our followers on Instagram and Facebook donated just $10, we would have enough to support 2 new researchers at 50k a year, start a new public education campaign, attend 3 more dental events to urge that group of individuals to screen every patient and facilitate at least 20 oral cancer screening events at no charge to the public.

Every donation you have made has given OCF the chance to change the world of oral cancer. Without your generosity, we could not approach this disease in the many ways we do. From sponsored research in molecular/DNA cancer markers and immunotherapeutics to public campaigns teaching children about the dangers of to***co, everything that OCF accomplishes is driven by your financial partnership with us through your generous donations.

Our donors and supporters ARE OCF. Without you, we would be a name connected to a cause, unable to enact real change. Every event participant, member of our patient support forum, dental professional working toward early discovery, and the financial donor is the heart and soul of OCF. You are our partners, and for that, we are endlessly grateful.

May you and your loved ones have a warm, wonderful, and healthy holiday season.

Please DONATE Today: https://donate.oralcancerfoundation.org

IRS registered non-profit 501(c)3 public service oral, head and neck cancer charity. USA