At the risk of sounding like a one-note opening act comedian:

What’s the deal with all those national awareness months?

In April, we had 15 separate awareness designations; among them were Alcohol Awareness Month, Child Abuse Awareness Month, Copyright Awareness Month, Foot Health Awareness Month and Yukon Biodiversity Awareness Month.

Most of the time, these awareness campaigns focus on mental or physical health conditions.

I don’t know who started them but I imagine some of the first to lay claim to awareness month campaigns were stalwart national nonprofit organizations such as the American Heart Association and the American Cancer Society.

National Child Abuse Awareness Month started in April 1983, after an act of Congress.

Once upon a time, awareness months were few.

Today, there are so many of them, it’s hard to keep track.

It’s a symptom of information overload, I suppose. Ironically, what started as an effort to increase awareness for very good reasons has morphed into a virus of good intentions amounting to dilution of the message. If you do a search in Google for “National Awareness Month,” you’ll see more than 11 million entries, though of course, many of those are duplicates.

Why should we care?

If increasing awareness of a problem is the goal — and let’s face it, many of these awareness campaigns are about problems — then having too many of them in a given month actually decreases rather than increases awareness.

A few friends who run the California-based Web site easilyamused.org thought the phenomenon interesting enough that they dedicated a Web page to it at aware.easilyamused.org. They’ve catalogued a compendium of national awareness events and titled February tongue-in-cheek as “National National Awareness Month Awareness Month.”

I propose a simple solution. Let’s establish a national awareness month quota. A commission could specify the number of awareness campaigns allowed for each month. Once it’s full, it’s full. Take a ticket, please.

Come to think of it, setting up another commission seems like a waste of time and energy.

We could have organizations bid for the few monthly spots available. Money raised through that bidding process could then go into a separate kitty to pay for research and/or staffing for these organizations. I dunno. It’s just a thought.

Oscar Halpert is editor of the Lynnwood/Mountlake Terrace Enterprise.