PROMOTE BREAST CANCER AWARENESS

Breast cancer awareness is an issue for anyone who has 8 female relatives, 8 female friends, or 8 female co-workers. That is because about 1 in 8 women will develop breast cancer at some time in her life, according to the American Cancer Society.

In the three minutes while you are reading this article, another woman in the United States will be diagnosed with breast cancer. Most women receiving the jarring news will be taken totally by surprise, as 85 percent of women who develop breast cancer have no known family history of the disease.

Spotting signs of breast cancer before it has a chance to progress to advanced stages is crucial. Regular mammograms for women in their forties and older is one of the best forms of early detection. Yet some 13 million American women in this age group have never had a single mammogram.

The good news is that the five-year breast cancer survival rate exceeds 95% when detected early. Many women are able to alert their doctors to potential problems by performing monthly breast self exams. For young women who don’t get mammograms, these breast exams are especially important because they can uncover problems that might otherwise go unnoticed.

More than 40,000 American women die of breast cancer each year. You can help save lives and spare families the pain of losing a mother, sister, wife, or daughter by spreading the word about early detection.

• Request breast self-exam cards or print them out yourself. Give them to friends and leave some in the ladies’ room at work for people to take. Contact local high schools and young women’s organizations about distributing information on breast self-exams. Getting in the routine of doing monthly breast self-exams from a young age helps set a pattern for life.
• If you have a sister who has/had breast cancer but you have never had the disease, see if you qualify for The Sister Study, a national long-term study of how environment and genes affect the chances of getting breast cancer.
• Check your health insurance policy at work to see if mammograms are either free or provided at a very low cost. If they are, Xerox the appropriate page and highlight the information. Post the page on an office bulletin board. Also ask that the information be spotlighted in the company newsletter to remind employees of this benefit. If mammograms are not covered, talk to the human resource department about the long-term benefit of covering this method of early detection.
• Contact a local affiliate of a national breast cancer organization such as Y-Me or the Susan G. Komen Foundation to see if it has a free speaker program. If so, set up a brown bag lunch seminar for women in your office to learn about early detection.
• Send a breast cancer awareness e-card to eight women you know over the age of 40 reminding them to do self exams and to schedule a yearly mammogram.