The Crowd:

Ethan Zohn than Zohn has been reborn. The 30-something athlete who gained fame and fortune as the winner of CBS Television’s “Survivor: Africa” in 2002, came to Newport Beach last week to front the 2010 Circle 1000 Founder’s Brunch benefiting the Hoag Cancer Center. In April 2009, Zohn was diagnosed with CD 20-positive Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, a rare form of cancer. Following aggressive treatment that nearly killed Zohn, his cancer went into remission Jan. 1. This is his new birthday.

“In order to live another day I had to dig deep — very deep to find the strength to survive the darkest moments that cancer can create,” said the candid young man from New York, who also shared lighter reflections on his personal struggle.

“My aunt in New Jersey kept coming to New York to see me in the hospital, bringing buckets of matzo ball soup. It’s a good cure for a cold, but has no effect whatsoever on cancer,” he added as the audience laughed. “By the way, did she think there was no matzo ball soup to be found in all of New York?”

Beside the personal aspect of Zohn’s experience, his speech was significant insofar as it addressed a crucial statistic. For young adults fighting cancer, there has been no real improvement in the survival rate over the past five years of study. Zohn told the crowd that thousands of young adults do not make it each year, in disproportionate numbers to the overall cancer survival rates of both younger and older age groups.

“Cancer is a club that nobody wants to be a part of, yet one in two men and one in three women will be faced with joining that club sometime during their lifetime,” Zohn said.

Cancer has become nothing short of a public heath crisis touching the lives of every American in some fashion.