http://www.thedailybeast.com/article...st-cancer.html
Bill Clinton’s New Gig: Curing Breast Cancer
by Abigail Pesta Nov 13, 2012 9:00 AM EST
With Obama set for four more years, Clinton joins a different
fight—seeking to end the disease that took his mother’s life. Abigail
Pesta on his new partnership with the National Breast Cancer
Coalition.
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inShare.(48) Fresh off a crusade to get President Obama reelected,
Bill Clinton is turning to a new campaign—breast cancer.
The former president is joining the National Breast Cancer Coalition,
a group of hundreds of cancer-fighting organizations, as honorary
chairman of its campaign to end the disease by 2020, the group said
Tuesday. The coalition has successfully lobbied for nearly $3 billion
in federal funds since its start two decades ago. Its president, Fran
Visco, is known for focusing heavily on research, saying mammograms
and pink ribbons won’t get the job done.
Bill Clinton addresses a Students for Obama rally at the University of
Minnesota. (Jim Mone / AP Photo)
“The stakes are too high, the losses have been too great to let
another decade go by without ending breast cancer,” Clinton said in
announcing the partnership. He has worked with the coalition on past
initiatives, including the 2005 launch of a fund in honor of his
mother, Virginia Clinton Kelley, who died of complications from breast
cancer.
Progress has been slow and public perception skewed, the National
Breast Cancer Coalition said in its annual report on the disease this
fall. “Given the attention and resources directed to breast cancer,
the public understandably believes that we have made significant
progress,” the report said. But “we know little about how to prevent
breast cancer or how to prevent deaths from the disease.”
The perception problem, the report said, is due in part to media
coverage, which does not always “reflect the realities of the
disease.” During Breast Cancer Awareness Month in October 2011, for
example, most coverage focused on young women’s triumphs and effective
treatments. “Often times, a picture was painted of survivors who are
disease-free and overcame the disease,” the report said. “Only about 1
in 9 articles portrayed women battling metastatic disease.”
The mortality rate for breast cancer has declined over the years, but
not sharply enough, especially given the amount of money invested,
says Visco. In 1975 there were 31 deaths for every 100,000 women
diagnosed in the U.S., according to the National Cancer Institute. In
recent years, that number has fallen to 23 deaths. In contrast, the
cervical-cancer death rate fell by a dramatic 70 percent between 1955
and 1992, according to the American Cancer Society, although the
comparison is not apples to apples. That drop was due mostly to the
increased use of the Pap test.
Visco says she believes the way to vanquish the disease is through
science. “We get sidetracked by efforts to focus on getting every
woman a mammogram. We could screen every woman in the world and we
would not have stopped breast cancer,” she recently told The Daily
Beast. “I am not saying to stop funding for screening; however, we
cannot afford to make it a main focus.”
That stance isn’t always popular, especially among women whose lives
have been saved by mammograms. Experts and doctors themselves differ
on how best to spend the bulk of funds—on mammograms or research.
Visco thinks the solution lies in studying how the cancer develops and
metastasizes. To that end, a key mission for her coalition has been
raising funds for a Department of Defense initiative called the Breast
Cancer Research Program. Her group has lobbied for some $2.8 billion
in federal funds for the research program since its start in 1992.
“We get sidetracked by efforts to focus on getting every woman a mammogram.”
Visco is a breast-cancer survivor herself. Diagnosed at age 39 when
she was a partner at a law firm in Philadelphia, she left her law
career to help launch the National Breast Cancer Coalition in 1991.
The grassroots effort has since grown to include hundreds of cancer
organizations and thousands of individual activists.
With women’s health issues embroiled in controversy this
year—including the Susan G. Komen flap over funding for Planned
Parenthood—Visco says she hopes the year ahead will see people come
together. “This election again showed the power and importance of
women as voters and political leaders,” she says. “Now we will look to
see if both parties learned from that fact and will pay attention to
issues important to us, like breast cancer and women’s health
overall.”
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