Young girls clad suggestively in nothing but pink ribbons, pink office supplies, pink foodstuffs packaging, pink ribbon magnets, pink ribbon buttons, pink themed shirts with bizzare phrases including the term “ta tas”. The search for “the cure” is demanded…as if you personally are holding it back by your deficiency of pink merchandise purchases!

Breast cancer is endemic in all human population groups. Yet poverty rate is the most accurate way to predict which geographic regions will have greatest occurrence of breast cancer, breast cancer complications, and deaths from breast cancer. The poor get hosed while the middle-class are fooled into wasting money during a historical economic downturn. Wasted on what? The gimmicky hot-pink garbage that mostly ends up promoting corporate sponsors.

I cannot pretend that I am expert on the details of breast cancer treatment, or the details of the condition itself. To focus on specifics such as the role of diet, skin pigment type, family history, genetics, and/or pregnancy history seems like a frivolous evasion that does not confront the true problem. Personally I know that the mitigation, treatment, and prevention for this condition and its complications seem very standard nowadays. Women that typically have less access to normal, typical, regular, boring, standard health services will be punished by suffering the most from the breast cancer condition.

The goodwill and money being used to fuel all the breast-cancer awareness would be more effectively spent on research regarding the causes and cures for poverty. If we could only prevent the needless deaths due to breast cancer and prevent unnecessary complications in poorer population groups it would be a great start to solving the real breast-cancer problem.

Hodge-podge ad-hoc methods for dealing with poverty do not work. The American experience in dealing with poverty has proven this. Compared to our counterparts in other developed countries we seem absurdly incompetent. Poverty relief services are handled by an incomprehensible mix of religious affiliated institutions, secular non-profits, local and state agencies, and federal government agencies.

Secular non-governmental do-gooder organizations (NGOs) tug at your heart-strings with guilt-ridden messages constantly extorting our money. The successful ones succeed because they focus on some narrow segment of society, or a narrow segment of the poverty problem. The religious institutions involved bring with them the conditions (real or implied) associated with that particular religion’s dogma, and the possibility, however remote and carefully mitigated, of an implied expectation of allegiance to that religion; along with the same problems NGOs posses. Is it wise national policy to have the expectation (however carefully mitigated) of modifying one’s religious beliefs because of their poverty?

As it’s beyond the scope of this post I will not even begin to address the strangeness and futility of the current American approach to government involvement in the poverty problem. Over the past 80 years the federal government’s anti-poverty resources have been spent primarily on prodding everyone towards home ownership (encouraging individuals to be heavily leveraged, immobile, and indebted as national policy) and steady jobs (no matter how menial and low paying). Can you see what steps are being skipped here? Oh yeah, the fed also expends money to make sure youngsters in public schools can experience a daily cafeteria lunch for cheap!*
*Excluding holidays, weekends, and summer break.

The three most basic aspects of poverty relief are what the current American system fails at, completely: food security, guaranteed safe and stable housing, and guaranteed access to health services. The importance of these aspects do not apply to one social group more than another. This importance is the same for everyone, not just the elderly, mothers, and children. Everyone, including ugly homeless men, irresponsible young adults, criminals, balding middle-aged men, prostitutes, drug addicts, and so on!

Are we more fearful at the thought of a famous blonde caucasian actress having her breasts lopped off than the thought of thousands of poor women not realizing that they have cancer in the first place, passing this suffering down the generations? I suppose that beautiful people’s breasts are more fun to think about.

In America, homeless pets have more universal guarantees of shelter, food, and health care than human beings. This should disgust you every waking moment of your life. I do not want animals to go homeless. Animals deserve the attention they are getting. But just why have Americans have been duped into giving homeless animals, and breast cancer broader attention than poverty?

As poverty-rate is the best predictor of who gets various cancer conditions/complications, I predict that as more individuals slip into poverty, more individuals will be involved with cancer complications including death, all other things remaining equal. The only way this will change, so that all things do not remain equal? It begins with universal health care.

Further Webby Reading:
Poverty, Genetics Linked to Cancer Risks in Blacks
April 04, 2006
Author: Charlene Laino
Published By: Fox/WebMD webmd.foxnews.com
URL: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,190574,00.html

Breast Cancer Screening and Socioeconomic Status
October 7, 2005
Author: SS Coughlin et. al.
Published By: Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (U.S. Gov’t) www.cdc.gov/mmWR/
URL: http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5439a2.htm

Peer Reviewed Reading:
Evaluating Local Differences in Breast Cancer Incidence Rates: A Census-Based Methodology (United States)
Angela Witt Prehn, Dee W. West
Cancer Causes & Control, Vol. 9, No. 5 (Oct., 1998), pp. 511-517
Published by: Springer
URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3553264

Race, Socioeconomic Status, and Breast Cancer Treatment and Survival
Cathy J. Bradley, Charles W. Given, and Caralee Roberts
Journal of the National Cancer Institute, Vol. 94, No. 7, (Apr., 2002),pp. 482-490
URL: http://jnci.oxfordjournals.org/content/vol94/issue7/

Altered Breast Development in Young Girls from an Agricultural Environment
Elizabeth A. Guillette, Craig Conard, Fernando Lares, Maria Guadalupe Aguilar, John McLachlan, Louis J. Guillette, Jr.
Environmental Health Perspectives, Vol. 114, No. 3 (Mar., 2006), pp. 471-475
Published by: The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS)
URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3436694

Posted by admin in Effyou