October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, as though we could not be
aware of either breast cancer itself, or the month in which we are
supposed to be keenly aware of it. Try to turn on the television and
count how many seconds till someone mentions it, or until a celebrity
talks about their own experience with the disease, or that of their
mother, sister or aunt. Count how many seconds till someone tells you
they're running for the cure. You won't make it to thirty. Log on to the
internet or go to a department store and see how many products are
offered to you along with a pink ribbon, the latter symbolizing that a
portion of the money you spent will go to breast cancer research.
Not that there's anything wrong with that, except that it's
disproportionate with the actual threat of the disease. Ask the average
woman -- or man -- what the number one killer of women is and they will
probably say breast cancer. But of course it's heart disease. Heart
Disease Awareness Month was in February, and I don't recall being
offered a ribbon the colour of an aorta or a valve, for example, every
time I purchased low fat foods. I don't recall any celebrities doing
advertisements reminding women not to fill their faces with Big Macs and
fries and milkshakes and I don't remember hearing any public service
announcements narrated by David Letterman. One in five women has some
form of cardiovascular disease, and more than twice as many women die
from heart disease than from all forms of cancer combined. Five times as
many women die from heart attacks as from breast cancer.
Yet a recent survey indicates that four out of five women are
unaware of the threat of cardiovascular disease. Breast cancer is our
"biggest fear," something I heard a news anchor bleat out the other
night, as he narrated a Breast Cancer Awareness feature. Well of course
it is, given the massive publicity accorded anything even remotely
associated with breast cancer. A year and a half ago a study came out
suggesting that breast self-examination was useless. It received only a
wee bit less publicity than September 11th. Two months ago another study
-- this one suggesting that mammograms were useless -- made big waves.
Along with the fear-mongering is the myth that women's illnesses
are underfunded, thanks to the evil hand of the male medical conspiracy.
According to the U.S. National Institute of Health, more money has been
spent on breast cancer research than on any other type of cancer in the
past 16 years. More generally, gender specific medical research has been
tilted towards women for at least the last 15 years. Significantly more
people yearly are diagnosed with prostate cancer than breast cancer, for
example, yet according to the NIH, in 1998, $348.6 million went to
breast cancer research, while prostate cancer garnered only $89.5
million. In the late 1990s women's health research overall was allotted
16% of the NIH budget and men's health only 5.7%. Which may be why heart
disease gets the short shrift in attention. It is something that kills
men, too, in even greater numbers than women.
As breast cancer became a poster disease for feminism in the 1980s,
the attention it began to receive took on unreasonable proportions. In
short, the intensity of funding, publicity and research around breast
cancer is not based on need. It is based on politics. I have nothing
against feminism and breast cancer publicity and research per se. But I
do when it comes at the expense of other research. The heart, one can
only conclude, is not as politically sexy as breasts, especially since
so many hearts belong to old white males. So it doesn't seem to matter
what a threat heart disease is to women. Not to mention that 1% of
breast cancer exists in men and yet I've never seen Brad Pitt reminding
men to perform breast self-examinations.
For a long time I was so afraid of breast cancer that I never
examined my breasts. I finally spoke to my gynecologist about it, who
sighed and told me I was not alone. Yes, he said, one in nine women will
get breast cancer...provided every woman on the planet lives to be 100.
And, he continued, if you do get it, yes, it is serious business, but
three times out of four, not fatal. Take a baby aspirin every other day,
he concluded, because heart disease really ought to be your biggest
fear. Women have done women a disservice by insisting so much on
"women's diseases." Creating hysteria where there needn't be any is
destructive, and taking attention away from where it should be isn't
much better.
Rondi Adamson is a writer in Toronto where she contributes to several
magazines and newspapers. She has a regular column at the Ottawa Citizen,
focusing on current events. Prior to beginning her writing career, she spent
nine years overseas -- in Japan, France and Turkey -- working as an ESL
teacher. (She can be reached at queenvalemon@aol.com).
