Cancer

Breast cancer is an horrible disease and it's even more repulsive as it has no cure and no known cause. It just appears out of thin air and turns our lives upside down. If you are fortunate enough to dicover it in the early stages, you will be able to follow proper treatment and have the breast tumour removed surgically and then maybe chemotherapy and radio-therapy until hopefully the disease is gone. However, nothing can guarantee you that it won't come back.

With all these nasty perspectives in mind think of the fact that there are still lots of people who are not so fortunate as to be able to detect it and treat it properly for various reasons. I am talking about the countries that lack the money, funds, education, hospital facilities, treatment devices and everything else needed when dealing with a huge number of breast cancer cases.

A very typical example is Philippines, a country in the Far East, that has an abnormally high incidence rate of breast cancer among the people living there. It is estimated by the statistics for breast cancer in the Philippines that 26 out of 100 women and 1 out of 100 men will experience breast cancer at a certain point in their lives. The numbers are huge and most of the time the outcome is not very satisfactory, as the survival rates are less than 50%. What's even worse is the fact that most of the affected population, almost 70% of the cases, are indigents, so very poor and lacking education and breast cancer awareness.

The breast cancer is now the first cause of death from cancer in the Philippines due to more factors: there are basically no possibilities of getting mammagrams or other advanced screenng of the breast for an early detection of the cancer and where there are such facilities only the few wealthy people have access there, the lack of education leads to the fact that people do not know anything about the symptoms or the ways of detecting breast cancer and they only go to the doctor when the cancer is in the final stage.

The treatment is also very expensive and most of the patients cannot afford it and also a big number of those suffering from this disease do not come to the doctor because they are ashamed. It may sound incredible, but, believe me, it's not.

Statistics for breast cancer in the Philippines also show something different from the cases met in the rest of the world: the age at which breast cancer occurs is a lot younger than in other countries (35-55 years old) as opposite to the US or Europe where this type of cancer is common for elderly women. Almosyt half a million women die from this cause every year. Only five percent of the breast cancer is inherited and the risk of getting it has reached a ratio of 1 in 18.

The numbers are merciless and show the facts as they are, so the situation there is pretty grim. Fortunately, I could see a non-ptofit foundation that was formed with the purpose of organizing breast cancer awareness campaigns all over the country and provide the people with all the information they need about breast cancer, hoping that this way these numbers will decrease a bit in the future.