Breast cancer project targets world's poor

Lauran Neergaard / Associated Press

Washington -- Nurses were training women in rural Mexico to examine their breasts for cancer when one raised her hand to object. If she lost her breast, Harvard public health specialist Felicia Knaul recalls the woman saying, "My man would leave me" -- and with him, the family's income.

International cancer specialists meet this week to plan an assault on a troubling increase of breast cancer in developing countries, where nearly two-thirds of women aren't diagnosed until it has spread through their bodies.

Adding to the problem, some worrisome data suggest that breast cancer seems to strike women, on average, about 10 years younger in poor countries than it does in the United States. No one knows why.

"Today in most developing countries you see a huge bulge of young, premenopausal women with breast cancer," says Knaul, who heads Harvard's Global Equity Initiative and was herself diagnosed at age 41 while living in Mexico.

"We should help them to know what they have and to fight for their treatment."

But from Mexico to Malawi, stigma like Knaul witnessed a few weeks ago may prove as big a barrier as poverty.

"One of the trainers said, 'If he'd leave you for that, he's not worth having,' " says Knaul. But she acknowledged that will be a hard message for some women's economic realities.

"It's not a trivial consideration," agrees Dr. Lawrence Shulman of the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, who is part of a team working to begin cancer care in parts of Africa. Tuesday, Knaul and Shulman brought together an international task force of health specialists and prominent charities to begin planning a two-pronged approach.

First, train midwives and other rural health providers to perform regular breast exams, using the power of touch in places where mammography machines simply are too expensive. That won't catch the very smallest tumors, but specialists agree it could improve diagnosis dramatically in some areas.

Second, the task force will start negotiating lower prices for generic chemotherapy for poor countries, following the same model that has helped transform AIDS care in parts of Africa.

Breast cancer long has been considered a cancer mostly of wealthier countries. Indeed, about 192,000 new cases are expected in the United States this year, where long-term survival is high thanks in part to good screening.