The Council of Student Representatives of the University of Castilla-La Mancha (CRE-UCLM) has today joined the celebration of World Cancer Day with an act in which a banner has been displayed in corporeal letters and different spaces of the Albacete, Ciudad Real, Cuenca and Toledo campuses and the Almadén and Talavera campuses with the aim of raising awareness, raising awareness and giving visibility to this disease .
The president of the CRE-UCLM, Óscar Sánchez, explained the social aspect that the group of students has in tune with the problems that affect society, beyond the purely educational and the defense of their interests. Sánchez pointed out that cancer “is a fight that affects us all” and that “it is essential to make the disease visible, even more so in these times when it has been silenced by the COVID pandemic.”
The rector of the UCLM, Julián Garde, has participated in this simple act from the Ciudad Real Campus recognizing the daily work carried out by the Spanish Association Against Cancer (AECC) and the role that students play in facilitating the lives of patients and their relatives.
In this sense, the rector, who has been accompanied by the vice-rector for Students, Angeles Carrasco, has referred to the two great contributions that the regional University can make in this fight. On the one hand, from the research point of view. "Without science there is no life, there is no future", he said, and then pointed out that there are several research groups that the institution has specialized in this field. On the other, from its volunteer program, through which students -as well as its teaching and research staff and administration and services staff- can be ambassadors and contribute to different organizations such as the Spanish Association against Cancer. Currently, there are already 35 institutions involved in the UCLM volunteer program.
A representation of the provincial AECC, headed by its president, Marciano Sánchez, has also approached the letters of the UCLM located on the Paseo del Paraninfo of the Rectorate of Ciudad Real, who has thanked the academic institution for its commitment in the fight against the illness. In this sense, he has encouraged university students to get involved in the association's volunteering because, he has said, "without them we are nobody"; while highlighting the research role of the University in the fight against cancer.
World Cancer Day is celebrated on February 4, promoted by the World Health Organization, the International Cancer Research Center (CIIC) and the International Union Against Cancer (UICC), with the aim of increasing awareness and mobilize society to advance in the prevention and control of this disease.