Cancer has long been a leading killer in the black community. One in nine African-American women in the United States will develop breast cancer during their lifetime, according to the American Cancer Society. Of those, 42 percent more are likely to die of the disease than white women.
“The disparities are shocking,” said Andrew Asato, CEO the local Komen organization.
But there’s little comparable at the a local level, something the Oregon and Southwest Washington chapter of the Susan G. Komen Foundation hopes to change. The group launched an initiative this week to collect data about health disparities in the black community to learn how health care providers can reduce barriers for black women to access support.
They received a grant from the OHSU Knight Cancer Institute Community Partnership Program to survey the region’s demographics, breast cancer screening habits and barriers to screening and treatment.
The team will be led by Angela Owusu-Ansah, Ph.D, a professor at Concordia University in Portland. It also includes Kelvin Hall, an adjunct professor and doctoral candidate at Concordia, and D. Bora Harris, a diversity consultant.
“As an African-American person, I realize the load on people impacted by cancer,” said Hall, who has had several family members die of the disease. “There needs to be support pieces out there, because it falls on the shoulders of just a few family members.”
The team also will look at the social as well as institutional obstacles African-American women face to health care.
“In addition to health disparities within our underserved and underrepresented communities, as African American women, we have historically been taught to ‘hush’ concerning many things,” Harris said. “This tradition of silence may have negatively impacted several phases of our quality of life in respect to our health.”
Once that data is collected, the nonprofit advocacy group plans to bring a set of recommendations to public and private health care providers, hospitals and community groups to help reduce the rate at which black Portlanders die from breast cancer.
“It is time to move beyond education and do what we can to encourage action,” said Asato.
Source: https://www.oregonlive.com/health/index.ssf/2018/07/oregon_komen_foundation_launch.html
Few women question, or have questioned, what’s really behind the war on cancer and the endless calls for breast cancer awareness. Most people would be much smarter and better informed if they had awareness of what this movement or the war on cancer do NOT raise awareness about.
Knowing that the most prominent cancer charities (Komen, American Cancer Society, etc) are large self-serving businesses instead of “charities” or that these groups suppress critical information on cancer, such as the known causes of cancer (instead they talk about “risk factors” of cancer) or that many “breast cancer survivors” are victims of harm instead of receivers of benefit, or that they’ve been intentionally misleading the ignorant public with deceptive cancer survival statistics, or that government health bodies such as the NIH are merely a pawns for corporate medicine, etc is a good start to get to the real truth (read this well referenced scholarly article’s afterword on the war on cancer: do a search engine query for “A Mammogram Letter The British Medical Journal Censored” by a published author of the Orthomolecular Medicine News organization, and scroll down to the afterword that addresses the fraudulent ‘war on cancer’).
The recognition that breast cancer awareness was started by these business interests is another piece of the real awareness about the pink ribbon cult and the traditional war on cancer. Or that the orthodox cancer business has been denouncing, suppressing and squashing a number of very effective and beneficial alternative cancer approaches (instead they sold you the lie that only their highly profitable/expensive, toxic conventional cancer treatments are relevant). You probably guessed why: effective, safe, inexpensive cancer therapies are cutting into the astronomical profits of the medical mafia’s lucrative treatments. That longstanding decadent activity is part of the fraud of the war on cancer.
So, raising “awareness” about breast cancer or raising funds for the war on cancer have hardly any other function than to drive more unsuspecting people into getting more expensive and unnecessary tests (think mammography) and then, often, cancer treatments (chemo and radiation therapy).