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Every explainer, knowledge check, and answer on Cancer Explained is free, based on trusted National Cancer Institute resources, and written in plain language. Here’s what’s waiting for you.
Recent updates
- August 22, 2026New featureEasier to useAccuracySafety
Video, everywhere it helps — and a clean-up pass across the library
Forty-nine more short videos joined the library, and every one of our videos now has a single page where you can browse them all. Alongside that, a sweep of every published page fixed photo captions that were showing internal file names, repaired links that pointed nowhere, and corrected one symptom page that named the wrong temperature.
- Forty-nine new one-minute videos cover the basics, screening, prevention, warning signs and the claims people most often search — all captioned, with no ads and no tracking.Watch all videos
- Every video now lives on one browsable page, grouped by what you are trying to work out. Before this, you could only find one by landing on the right guide.Video libraryUnderstanding reports
- Photographs across the library were showing internal catalogue names as their captions. Those are gone — a caption is now either real descriptive text or nothing at all.How we review content
- Repaired links on more than fifty guides that pointed at pages which do not exist, so the next step in a guide now actually opens.Browse the library
- Corrected a symptom page that gave 100.5°F as the fever to act on. The whole site now says 100.4°F (38°C), and an automated check covers our video captions too.Fever during chemotherapy
- August 21, 2026New featureAccuracy
Watch it explained: 30 short videos, captioned and checked
Cancer Explained now has video. Thirty short explainers — how to read a pathology report, staging and TNM, biopsy results, frightening scan language, and the most-asked myth checks — play right on the relevant pages: self-hosted, captioned, no ads, no tracking. Every narration script was checked line by line against the site's sourced pages before rendering, the same standard our articles are held to.
- Seven walkthrough explainers cover whole reports — pathology, imaging, staging, grade vs. stage, margins, tumor markers — and appear on the matching guides and the reports hub.Understanding reports
- Twenty-three quick answers, each about a minute: single report terms like invasive, in situ, Ki-67, HER2, Gleason and BI-RADS, plus everyday questions — does sugar feed cancer, does 5G, what actually causes it.Report decoder
- August 21, 2026New guidesAccuracy
44 new guides and research explainers, checked line by line against federal sources
A survey of the topics people encounter in cancer news led to 44 new pages: 38 plain-language guides — from reading an eosinophil count to caregiving during radiation — and 6 explainers on recent FDA approvals and major trial results. Every page was written from NCI, FDA, CDC and NIH sources, then independently fact-checked against those sources before publication.
- New everyday-question guides: bone scans, colon polyps found at colonoscopy, 2D vs 3D mammograms, lung cancer in people who never smoked, skin cancer in people of color, and more.Browse all articles
- Six research explainers translate recent advances — the CHALLENGE exercise trial in colon cancer, the INTERLACE, CROWN, LAURA and NADINA trials, and the FDA approval of revumenib for acute leukemia — into what was actually shown, and what was not.Latest news
- Four new claim checks weigh popular claims — fenbendazole, ivermectin, base tans, and chocolate — against what FDA and NCI actually say.Claim checks
- August 21, 2026AccuracyEasier to use
Honest dates on every page, and clearer nonprofit facts up front
August's accuracy and safety passes changed thousands of pages, but the pages kept their older “last updated” dates. Every article now shows the date its content actually last changed, in English and Spanish. The homepage mission now states our IRS-recognized 501(c)(3) status plainly, and two practical tools that search engines could not find are now in our sitemap.
- More than 3,100 articles now display the date they were truly last revised, reflecting this month's fever-threshold, medicine-safety and accuracy work — so “Last updated” means what it says.How we review content
- The homepage mission band now says plainly that Cancer Explained is a program of an IRS-recognized 501(c)(3) nonprofit public charity — the same facts our About and Transparency pages document.About usNonprofit status & governance
- The Symptom Diary and Next Steps Tracker are now listed in our sitemap, so search engines — and you — can find them.Symptom DiaryNext Steps Tracker
- August 20, 2026SafetyAccuracy
One temperature, one rule: 100.4°F, on every page
Two trusted sources give two different fever thresholds for chemotherapy — CDC says 100.4°F (38°C), while NCI prints 100.5°F beside the same Celsius figure. As of today every page on this site teaches the lower, safer number, an automated check keeps it that way, and our medicine guides now draw a clean line between what you handle at home and what only your treatment team runs.
- Every page that names a fever threshold during cancer treatment now says 100.4°F (38°C), matching CDC — in English, Spanish, and every other language we publish. Where a page quotes NCI’s printed 100.5°F, it now also shows the conversion and tells you to act on the lower number. A new automated check blocks any future page from teaching the higher one.Fever during chemotherapy
- Medicine guides now follow one rule. Amounts you handle at home — tablet strengths, missed-dose rules — stay on the page, tied to your own prescription label. Schedules only your treatment team runs — dose build-ups, infusion amounts, monitoring calendars — live where they belong: in your prescription, not on a web page that cannot know your kidneys, your liver, or your other medicines.Cancer medicines, explained
- The money-saving guide now says plainly what was always true: tips like splitting tablets or partial refills are for supportive medicines, never for the cancer drug itself — with a direct route to real financial help for the drug that actually costs the most.Saving money on cancer medicines
- If you suddenly cannot urinate at all, that is an emergency now — not after 24 hours. Two pages that used a 24-hour figure now separate acute retention, which cannot wait, from low urine output over a day, which is a different problem.Warning signs
- August 19, 2026New guidesLanguages
The melanoma vaccine result, explained in four parts, and a safety review of every translated page
This week's news writing takes two stories people are arriving confused about and explains what the findings actually support — including four pages on the melanoma trial alone, because most of the confusion is in the difference between what it measured and what people think it measured. Alongside them, our pages in eleven other languages were reviewed against their English versions so that the when-to-get-help guidance reads the same in every one.
- A phase 3 trial of a personalized mRNA therapy plus pembrolizumab reported that melanoma took longer to come back after surgery. The result is real, the numbers are not published yet, and overall survival is not mature — the article says all three.What the melanoma vaccine trial found
- Three companion pieces go under that headline: what a therapy built from one person’s own tumor actually is, why “recurrence-free survival” is not the same as living longer, and what the result changes for someone who has already had melanoma removed — which, today, is nothing.What an individualized neoantigen therapy isWhat recurrence-free survival measuresWhat it means for patients now
- A study linking daily sugary drinks to stomach cancer was widely reported as nearly tripling the risk. That is accurate, and the absolute risk stays small: 278 cancers among 112,284 people over 36 years.Sugary drinks and stomach cancer
- Our pages in Arabic, Chinese, French, Haitian Creole, Hindi, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Tagalog, Thai and Vietnamese were reviewed against their English versions, so the guidance on when to get help now reads the same in all eleven — in that language, not in English.All languages
- August 19, 2026SafetyAccuracy
An independent safety audit, and the source review completed
We commissioned an outside review of the medical safety of this library, worked through every finding it raised, and published our reasoning where we disagreed. In the same week the source-review programme finished: every page on this site has now been checked line by line against the source it cites.
- Every finding the audit raised was worked through and resolved. Where we disagreed with one, we recorded why, rather than changing a page to make a report come back clean.How we review
- Patient pages point you at your own prescription label rather than at prescriber-facing dose tables. Where a page names a dose you might actually handle at home, the number to follow is the one on your own box.How we review
- Urgent-symptom guidance was tightened across the library, and an automated check now blocks any future page that would place an emergency in a slower tier.Warning signs
- The source-review programme is complete. All 2,656 remaining pages were reviewed, so every page here has been through a source check at least once.Our sources
- August 17, 2026Accuracy
Survival figures brought up to the newest data release
Survival statistics go out of date quietly — the number sits on the page long after it stops being the current one. Every page on the site that carries one has been refreshed against the latest release, and the sourcing behind each figure is now stated precisely.
- All 289 pages carrying survival or stage-distribution figures now use the current data release.Understanding cancer statistics
- Where a page gives case or death counts for a calendar year, it now credits the American Cancer Society explicitly. Those are projections rather than measurements, and knowing which is which changes how much weight a number should carry.Understanding cancer statistics
- A further 62 pages completed review and are now published.What we publish
- August 15, 2026Easier to use
A faster site, and a front door that asks where you are
Most people arrive here on a phone, often on a bad connection, often within a day of hearing news they did not want. The home page now starts with where you are rather than with what we have, and the pages themselves load faster.
- The home page opens with a short set of routes — newly diagnosed, in treatment, caring for someone — instead of asking you to pick from a library.Home
- Pages load noticeably faster on phones. We stopped preloading menus nobody had opened, dropped a compatibility bundle modern browsers do not need, and added a smaller image size for the phone screens that were downloading one too large.Home
- The donate page was rebuilt: clearer about what a gift pays for, honest that we cannot price a single page, and it now mentions employer matching where you can see it.Donate
- August 13, 2026Safety
One clear standard for when a symptom cannot wait
Knowing whether something needs a phone call, a same-day appointment or an emergency room is one of the hardest things to judge from home. All 881 pages that tell a reader when to act now follow a single standard, matched to CDC and NCI wording, in English and in Spanish.
- A fever during chemotherapy is a medical emergency. Every chemotherapy-related page now says so in the CDC’s own words, with the temperature that counts and what to do at any hour of the day or night.Fever during chemotherapy
- Our highest-risk pages — emergencies, dosing, anything where acting on a single sentence matters most — were each re-read against the source they cite, and now sit on a shorter re-check cycle than the rest of the library.How we review
- Guidance was calibrated in both directions. Some situations now escalate faster; others no longer send you to an emergency room for something that can safely wait for the clinic. Being wrong either way has a cost, and we tuned for both.Warning signs
- August 11, 2026New guides
358 new plain-language guides on the questions people actually ask
We looked at what patients, survivors and caregivers ask each other in public online communities, then checked every one of those questions against what we already had. Most were already covered. The ones that were not became this release: how to read the words on a scan or lab report, what specific side effects feel like and what to do about them, honest answers to circulating claims about food, household products and workplaces, and the practical machinery of insurance appeals, leave from work and disability benefits. Every page is written from a named federal source, at a grade 7 to 8 reading level.
- Report and lab language, decoded one term at a time, so a result you read in a portal at 10pm makes sense before your next appointment.Tests and scans
- Day-to-day treatment questions, from port care and mouth sores to what to eat when nothing appeals.Side effects
- Straight answers on claims that circulate online about food, household products, devices and workplace exposures, each one checked against NCI, FDA, CDC or EPA.Prevention and risk
- The parts nobody explains: appealing a denial, external review, FMLA, ADA accommodations, SSDI and the Compassionate Allowances list.Living with cancer
- August 9, 2026New guides
When Advanced Prostate Cancer Starts Moving Again
Hunter Biden told the BBC that his father's prostate cancer had spread further into the bones and was painful. We added a page about what that phase actually involves: how progression is measured, what castration-resistant disease means, which treatments are approved once hormone therapy stops holding, and why reporting pain early makes the medicine work better.
- A new page on what it means when advanced prostate cancer progresses, with the emergency signs that need an emergency department the same night.Hunter Biden says his father's cancer has spread further
- The original page on the 2025 diagnosis now carries an August 2026 update and links across to it.What Joe Biden's diagnosis can help us understand
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