Cancer's public faces.

Byline: The Register-Guard

The American Cancer Society estimates that 154,000 people in the United States will be diagnosed with colorectal cancer this year, and 52,000 will die of the disease. That's terrible - but it also means most will go on with their lives. White House spokesman Tony Snow is showing how to do that, even in the face of a recurrence. Snow joins Elizabeth Edwards, wife of Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, as a prominent face among the millions of Americans for whom cancer is a fact of life, not a sentence of death.

All cancer survivors fear a recurrence until their disease is far enough past for them to be counted as having been cured. Snow underwent surgery for colon cancer two years ago, followed by a course of chemotherapy. Edwards was treated for breast cancer at about the same time. Both recently learned that their cancers have returned.

That's never good news, but further treatment can be effective. The treatment is not an experience anyone would choose to endure, but the odds are good that Snow and Edwards will continue to lead productive lives. Both can make a better guess than most about the eventual cause of their deaths. But like others, neither knows exactly when he or she will die, and in the meantime both can expect a high quality of life.

Snow and Edwards are walking proof of how far society and medicine have come in the past few decades. Many cancers are, in fact, curable; increasing numbers of people go for five years without a recurrence. The odds are improving steadily with early diagnosis, combined with continuing advances in treatment. The fact that cancer is being beaten by people every day has helped bring the disease out of the shadows. That, in turn, helps ensure that greater numbers of people receive the screening that can lead to a diagnosis in the early, treatable stages of the disease.

The examples of such people as Snow and Edwards reinforce the progress on the medical front. They and others ranging from bicycling champion Lance Armstrong to Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani prove that it's possible not only to survive cancer, but thrive in spite of it. They are examples by virtue of their visibility - this newspaper published Snow's work when he was a syndicated columnist.

But in other respects, Snow and Edwards are just like millions of others. They'll have good days and bad days. They'll rely on the support of family and friends. And they'll respond with a kind of courage that most people don't know they have until it's needed.

Cancer simply isn't what it used to be. More progress is needed, especially in the realm of prevention - smoking remains the leading cause of cancer - but the change has been profound.

A disease that was once so feared that its name was only whispered has been brought into the open by millions of survivors who have every reason to plan on being alive tomorrow, the next day and beyond.