One in nine men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer, the second leading cause of death in men in the United States. Survival varies greatly depending on the disease’s severity and extent at diagnosis: five-year survival rates are near 100% for local or regional disease, but they drop to 30% for metastatic prostate cancer.

On January 23, 2020, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted accelerated approval to tazemetostat for adults and pediatric patients aged 16 years and older with metastatic or locally advanced epithelioid sarcoma not eligible for complete resection.

Smoking cessation efforts had been gaining ground for decades. Tobacco use and smoking rates were dropping, year after year, as prevention and awareness campaigns worked to codify the dangers of tobacco. People weren’t just quitting smoking; people were avoiding the habit altogether—until the advent of vaping. Reversing a decade-long decline in smoking rates, e-cigarettes and vaping products have engendered an entirely new generation of would-be smokers to pick up the habit. Targeting underage users, the vaping industry experienced a boom. The issue grew with such ferocity that the U.S.

To better understand the demands and demographics of the larger RN community, the Health Resources Services Agency (HRSA) compiled data from the National Sample Survey of RNs (NSSRN). Released in January 2020, the report is a compendium of information and questions RNs have answered about different aspects of the life and work. The data collected since 1977 provides insight into the latest trends and future workforce projections, and HRSA uses it to help allocate workforce resources.

In 2020, approximately 13,800 new cases of invasive cervical cancer will be diagnosed in the United States. Prevention and screening are critical to reducing its incidence, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) launched an awareness campaign in January in recognition of Cervical Health Awareness Month. The movement educates women about cervical cancer risks, how and when to get the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine, the vaccine’s impact on cancer rates, and how to promote awareness.

The push and pull of budget negotiations makes for great headlines, but more important is the outcome when lawmakers finally arrive at a consensus. Earlier in December, the National Institutes of Health announced a $2.6 billion overall increase in funding, including a $297 million increase to the National Cancer Institutes (NCI), for fiscal year 2020.

Entrectinib was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in August 2019 as the third tumor-agnostic cancer drug, meaning it targets a specific mutation of the cancer, not the organ of origin. The other two currently approved tumor-agnostic drugs are larotrectinib and pembrolizumab.

Get to know Maggie A. Smith, DNP, MSN/Ed, RN, OCN^®, director-at-large on the ONS Board of Directors from 2017–2020. Maggie is an oncology nurse navigator at the University of Chicago Medical Center in Illinois.

In celebration and recognition of Florence Nightingale’s 200^th birthday, the World Health Organization (WHO) designated 2020 as the “Year of the Nurse and Midwife.” As part of this initiative, WHO is holding seminars, publishing papers, and is developing the first-ever State of the World’s Nursing report which will release at the 73rd World Health Assembly.