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As I am sure you know, October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. For women worldwide, breast cancer is the most common cause of cancer related death. In honor of the men and women fighting breast cancer, and in the hope that we will develop the means to prevent breast cancer in the future, I have partially “pinkified” my site. If you want to learn more about the pink websites campaign started by Matthew Oliphant, you can visit PinkForOctober.org.

To be honest, I didn’t know much about breast cancer until a few years ago, when my doctor, fearing that the lump in one of my lumpy breasts could be cancer, sent me for a mammogram and then to a surgeon. I was fine, but the experience scared me. During the 2 weeks of waiting for my mammogram results and my appointment with the surgeon to finally arrive, I bought a book that I would recommend to anyone who wants to learn more about breast cancer, Dr. Susan Love’s Breast Cancer Book. I read when I’m scared and confused, and Dr. Love’s book was warm and informative.

Breast Cancer Awareness Month is a time when foundations are able to raise substantial monies for prevention research, and people do learn more about breast cancer. But although we can read all sorts of hopeful stuff about famous survivors (Yeah Brigitte Bardot, Edna Campbell, Diahann Carroll, Barbara Ehrenreich, Melissa Etheridge, Marianne Faithfull, Peggy Fleming, Janette Howard, Kate Jackson, Adamari López, Kylie Minogue, Kitten Natividad, Sandra Day O’Connor, Richard Roundtree, Carly Simmon, Jaclyn Smith, Suzanne Somers), especially from media and corporations that make money off breast cancer, women still die at an alarming rate. In the United States, 40,000 women die from breast cancer each year, in Canada, 22,000, in the United Kingdom, about 12,000. Survival rates are not equal for all women:

In Uganda, it is estimated that 85 percent of the breast cancer patients die within two-three years after the treatment. So being diagnosed with breast cancer is assumed to be synonymous with a death sentence.

— Allafrica.com

Worldwide, breast cancer deaths are increasing, rather than decreasing:

As recently as two decades ago breast cancer was not a significant public health concern in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). However, mortality rates from breast cancer have been increasing for at least 40 years in most LAC countries. Socioeconomic development and consequent changes in reproductive behaviors over the past 50 years are thought to have contributed to the increased risk of breast cancer.

РPanamericana de Salud P̼blica

Breast Cancer Awareness Month is also a time when corporations market all variety of pink ribbon and breast cancer related merchandise to the breast cancer market (whatever that is, people like me, I guess). The promise is that if you buy merchandise x, a tiny percentage of corporation x’s profit will go toward breast cancer research. If you like to shop, you feel good thinking, “well if I buy some of this stuff, my purchase will be doing some good.” Well, according to Samatha King, Professor of physical and health education and women’s studies at Queen’s University, in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, that ain’t necessarily so. King’s article, “Are We Getting Pinkwashed?” published in the Toronto Star, challenges the consumer-oriented approach to advocacy:

Businesses looking to sell more products to female consumers have been quick to latch onto to changing attitudes toward breast cancer, and the pink ribbon industry that has emerged as a result is deeply dependent upon a positive image of the disease.

Sickness and death do not sell, but images of survivors who are uniformly youthful, ultrafeminine, immaculately groomed, radiant with health, and seemingly at peace with the world, do.

The effect of breast cancer marketing campaigns is to erase from public consciousness the fact that incidence rates remain stubbornly high and newly diagnosed women face essentially the same options — surgery, radiation, chemotherapy — that they did 40 years ago…

King goes on to demonstrate how little money from corporate breast cancer campaigns actually goes to breast cancer research:

The nationwide breast cancer promotion undertaken by Yoplait, the yogurt company, last year. For every Yoplait Source yogurt purchased by a consumer, Ultima Foods, which owns the licence to produce the yogurt in Canada, promised to donate 10 cents to the Quebec Breast Cancer Foundation. But the offer runs for just eight weeks, ending Oct. 15, which means that a consumer would have had to buy and then consume the equivalent of three cartons of yogurt a day during that period to raise just $16.80 for the cause.

Of course it could be argued that as long as lots of people across the country are diligently buying their yogurts, it wouldn’t matter if each individual raised only, say $5. But the donations are capped at $80,000. This means that if and when the maximum donation is reached, consumers are no longer contributing to the struggle against the disease with their purchases.
— Samantha King

King’s book Pink Ribbons Inc.: Breast Cancer and the Politics of Philanthropy deals with these issues in more depth.

There are other things you can do, of course. This Sunday is Boston’s “Making Strides Against Breast Cancer” a national campaign sponsered by the American Cancer Society. Tomorrow I will be helping with the set-up. If you live in Boston, it is not too late to get involved! You can walk as an individual or with a group. The Boston website is here. If you are elsewhere in Massachusetts, there are walks all over the state. You can learn more here.

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