Breast Cancer Awareness Month begins this week, on October 1, a time dedicated to education, early detection, and saving lives. As the pink ribbon takes centre stage this week, the call is clear: awareness must lead to action, and screening remains our strongest weapon in the fight against breast cancer.
Breast and Oncoplastic Surgeon
Pink Hibiscus Breast Centre
What does a yellow, red, and pink ribbon have in common? The answer might surprise you. In 1979, during the Iran hostage crisis, a wife of one of the hostages first tied yellow ribbons around trees to signal her anxiety for her husband to come home. Then, during the Gulf War 11 years later, these same yellow ribbons were used again. At that time, AIDS activists incorporated the idea of a ribbon as a medium of communication and identity—only this time, it was red. The wave of understanding how powerful the humble ribbon can be was well underway.
Breast cancer awareness was poorly funded globally but was becoming a major issue in public health. In the US, it was being championed as a public health crisis as data showed poor survival rates and lagging access to quality care. It was thus, in the 1980s, that this momentum led to yet another adoption of a ribbon—the pink ribbon.
Today we owe much to the drive and passion of faraway people like Estée Lauder and the Susan G Komen Foundation, who never thought their actions in the United States could have an impact on women in a small remote island like ours.
October is now globally declared as Breast Cancer Month. It’s a focused time to encourage women to become aware, educated, and motivated to take breast care into their own hands. Just like the original Estée Lauder campaign, helping women to understand breast health and self-examination forms a key component of today’s drive. But we have moved far forward from those formative years. Now the drive isn’t just awareness, but also to sensitise, demystify, and educate for killer care.
The single most effective tool for this is still breast screening. It continues to remain true that the smaller we can diagnose and treat a woman’s breast cancer, the better her chances of survival and cure. Everything changes for the better when it is found at an earlier stage—and that means at a smaller size. For us to achieve that, the only thing today that can get us there is annual breast screening.
The data is clear that breast screening saves lives. The challenge is that there are still many misconceptions about its role and utility. Many doctors still don’t understand how to access and utilise screening. Many women also struggle with this. And there’s a lot of misinformation on the internet and social media that only serves to cause harm.
We must appreciate that screening is not a perfect instrument. It is not a magic bullet. But pitted against all other options, it saves lives by leaps and bounds. This article is not to discuss all the issues or problems we face locally with health care and cancer treatment. It is to open up a discussion on how we can and should address what we, as a community and as a nation, can do to enhance the lives of women by ensuring access to quality breast care.
The goal is to motivate women to be screened, not just this year but yearly. Over time, we can champion a National Breast Screening Programme. Then, as a nation, we can be unburdened by the devastating impact of late-stage diagnosis and poor survival rates. We can move towards helping women in Trinidad and Tobago to be successfully treated. I speak joyfully of being cured. They all deserve it.
