Foreword: Looking Beyond Cure: Pediatric Cancer as a Model

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Abstract
In treating and controlling cancer, the most dramatic evidence of progress is that seen in childhood cancer. Once almost uniformly fatal, pediatric cancer has become a commonly curable illness in the last 30 years. For children diagnosed with cancer, the current 5-year cancer-free survival rate is 79%, and the 10-year survival rate is approaching 75% (Rowland et al., 2004). These figures already surpass the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (2000) Healthy People 2010 goal (Rowland et al., 2004) of 5-year survival for 70% of those diagnosed with cancer, and they exceed that for the adult population, where 5-year survival currently stands at 64%. Although pediatric cancer survivors currently represent less than 2% of the 9.8 million cancer survivors in the United States, they are in many respects the vanguard of survivorship.[B3] With the growing population of those living years beyond a cancer diagnosis, survivorship has emerged as an important field, leading to the establishment in 1996 of the Office of Cancer Survivorship at the National Cancer Institute, charged with expanding, directing, and championing cancer survivorship research and education.