As with every year at The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (LLS), our staff and volunteers work hard to provide the highest quality services and events as possible, as well as to advocate on behalf of blood cancer patients and fund critical research.

Here are some interesting highlights from 2008 to remind you of what we've worked to accomplish:

• Our Patient Services group did it again by offering more than 20 free telephone education programs to patients, caregivers, and medical professionals around the globe. These programs featured expert speakers who talked about topics ranging from Advocating for Your Child's Learning Needs: Through Treatment and Beyond to Tomorrow's Therapies Today: Clinical Trials for Leukemia, Lymphoma & Myeloma. Find out what free programs are available for registration now by going to the National Education Programs web page now.

• Speaking of clinical trials, LLS now supports a free clinical trial service that enables blood cancer patients to find clinical trials more easily. Patients can also call the Information Resource Center at (800) 955-4572 if they need assistance while using the system. Learn more about TrialCheck® at our website today.

• Our local chapters have been hard at work in the communities they serve. The Chapter Education Programs reached 48,000 patients and caregivers in 2008. Our Family Support Groups, also a community-based program, reached 12,000 participants in 2008. Find out more about this program.

• Aside from launching The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society Blog (this blog that you're reading right now), we also launched The Light The Night Walk Blog. Read about inspiring people and fundraising successes there.

• LLS now offers more than 50 different up-to-date free booklets, fact sheets and brochures on blood cancer, treatment and support topics. Most are available in Spanish, as well. Browse our Free Materials section and download or order your free copies today.

• LLS awarded a new Marshall A. Lichtman Specialized Center of Research (SCOR) grant to Beverly Mitchell, M.D., George E. Becker Professor of Medicine at Stanford University. She and her team will receive $1.25 million a year for five years, for a total of $6.25 million. Learn more about this award, and what Dr. Mitchell and her team are researching.

There's so much more that we've done over the last year (lots of events, new booklets and fact sheets, not to mention, introduce our new president and CEO, John Walter), and we're still going strong even as the year is coming to a close.

As we look to 2009, we realize that there's so much that we still need to be doing in the fight against blood cancers, but we can't do it without the support of our donors. We know that so many of you receive countless requests from other charities and non-profits at this time of year, but if you have been personally affected by a blood cancer then you understand the value of what The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society offers. Your secure tax-deductible online donation will help us to be able to continue to offer the services and events that are critically needed by patients, caregivers and survivors in 2009.

Every little bit helps. Donate to LLS today.

We sponsor a lot of very interesting teleconferences, but they usually take place on a weekday in the middle of a day. This means that many people who are at work or busy doing something else are not able to listen to these live events. Luckily we have our telephone education programs archived on our website, and additionally we have several podcast feeds.

Up until just a few days ago we had three podcast feeds:

• Blood CancerCAST – all of our teleconferences

• CML LinksCAST – Chronic Myelogenous Leukemia teleconferences

• Lymphoma LinksCAST – Hodgkin and Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma teleconferences

We just added seven more podcast feeds to make it easier for people to listen to the teleconferences they are interested in. Here’s a list of our new feeds:

• AML PathwaysCAST – Acute Myelogenous Leukemia teleconferences

• Childhood CancersCAST – teleconferences related to the childhood cancers

• CLL LinksCAST – Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia teleconferences

• MDS CAST – Myelodysplastic Syndrome teleconferences

• Myeloma OutlookCAST – Myeloma teleconferences

• Non-Hodgkin LymphomaCAST – Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma teleconferences

• SurvivorshipCAST – teleconferences related to practical information for those living with the blood cancers

Okay – so a lot of people may not know what RSS or podcasts are. I’ll try to explain.

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) has been around for quite a while (since about 1999), but it hasn’t really taken off until the last few years. Personally, I didn’t really start to utilize it myself until a couple of years ago, but now I am taking advantage of it on almost a daily basis.

RSS allows you to read content from all of your favorite websites in one place. Do you find that you don’t have time to visit all of those websites on a daily basis, but you still want to read their content? The solution is to create an account with an aggregation service like Google Reader or Newsgator, then add your favorite website’s feed to the aggregator. At this point those websites syndicate their information to you.

A podcast feed acts the same way, except instead of text-based content, websites (like ours) can syndicate their digital media files (like teleconferences) to you. With our podcast feeds you’ll always stay up to date when there is a new teleconference, making it so you have less of a chance to miss that important and informative information.

Learn more about our new feeds and RSS on our LLS News Feeds and Podcasts page.