When Patricia Russell was in her late 30s, she felt a lump in her breast. She knew the texture, the feel of the lump, was not normal.
“I was at a stage in my life where I wanted to take charge of my health. But I wasn’t expecting [breast cancer], I wasn’t looking. As a matter of fact, I’m one of the women who said ‘this will never happen to me,’” she said at a press conference Thursday.
But after finding the lump, Russell began examining herself and found what felt like may have been a mass.
“This feels weird, this is not normal, I wanted to push it off,” she said. She fought that instinct and went to get examined, and ended up being diagnosed with breast cancer.
Since that fateful day,Russell has survived two bouts with the disease. Now, she is part of a campaign launched this week with Toronto-based lingerie company Love & Nudes to not only raise awareness about breast cancer in Black people, but to urge the federal government to lower the age of breast cancer screening programs across the country to include those who are 40 years old so that more people of colour can have cancer detected earlier.
Russell spoke at the press conference with other breast cancer survivors and doctors to discuss health disparities, and why Black people, who have worse outcomes when it comes to breast cancer, are being screened less for the disease and are up against a health-care system they saypromotes resources that are centered on white people.
Canada does not routinely track race-based data around breast cancer screening rates, but other Western nations have shown Black people have clear, poorer outcomes when it comes to breast cancer.
In the U.S., Black women are 40 per cent more likely to die from breast cancer and the figure has remained that high for over a decade, according to the American Cancer Society (ACS).
As well, Black women younger than age 50 had a death rate that was twice as high as white women at that age, according to the ACS. The group states that screening rates have not increased and racial disparities in screening rates need to be addressed to start to fix the issue.
According to 2021 data from the federal government and the Canadian Cancer Society, cancer screening rates are lower for racialized people, whoface multiple barriers to screenings, and late diagnosis results in poorer outcomes and a lower survival rates.
The COVID-19 pandemic has also disproportionately impacted Black people due to structural racism and neglect of communities, meaning that these challenges to getting screened have likely been made worse, the report states.
As well, the report notes that two in five Canadians will develop cancer in their lifetime, and about a quarter of all Canadians will die from cancer in their lifetime. For women in 2021, breast cancer was the most common cancer diagnosis, making up 25 per cent of the close to 111,000 cancer cases found in women that year. The Canadian Cancer Society also estimates about 15 women die of breast cancer per day in Canada.
WHY BLACK PEOPLE HAVE WORSE OUTCOMES
Love & Nudes, a lingerie company founded in 2017 by entrepreneur Chantal Carter, sells nude underwear that matches the skin tones of racialized women. Carter told CTVNews.ca in a phone interview Thursday that traditional “nude” colours in lingerie too often are designed with only white people in mind.
This image provided by Love & Nudes shows the insert the lingerie company plans to provide to customers, to show how a cancerous lump could present on those with darker skin tones. (Love & Nudes)
For the campaign on breast cancer, the company is planning to include an insert, in multiple skin tones, with purchases inthe near future that has been made to mimic how a cancerous lump might look on a person of colour. For instance, the redness that could appear for those in lighter skin tones will not be present for the example meant to reflect Black people, said Carter.
She said many people in her life have been impacted by breast cancer, and a close family friend died of the illnesses in her 40s.
“When I discovered these statistics that Black women have a mortality rate that’s 40 per cent higher than white women, it reminded me of my brand and what it stands for:representation,” she said. “The face of cancer is not usually ours.”
The collection with the inserts has been named “Stage Zero” to highlight that awareness and prevention can help keep Black peoplefrom being given a fatal diagnosis, with the hope breast cancer can be caught earlier if screenings are encouraged.
Dr. Mojola Omole, a Toronto-based surgical oncologist who is participating in the Love & Nudes campaignand helped design the insert, told CTVNews.ca via a phone interview Friday that issues with receiving a timely diagnosis are due to systemic barriers around getting screened and accessing care.
“All women, and especially racialized women, should be screened at the age of 40 and it should be yearly. You can’t be afraid of what you might find out, because you don’t want to upstage your disease,” she said.
The earlier the disease is caught, the more easily it can be treated, she said.
Across provinces and territories, mammography is used for screening for breast cancer with the goal of catching any signs or symptoms before the illness actually develops. Programs around screenings start at age 50, though women can often request an earlier screening.
Within Black communities, there can be stigma around discussing cancer due to fear, said Omole.
“By ignoring it, it doesn’t go away,” she said.
People are not always getting access to information about how detecting cancer early can give someone a better chance to return to their normal life, she said.
There’s lots of misinformation online, and the health-care system doesn’t always target specific groups or address their concerns, she said.
This image shows the inserts Love & Nudes plans to send to customers to highlight how a cancerous lump could appear on various skin tones. (Love & Nudes)
Omole said inserts that show what a lump looks and fees likes, such as the ones being distributed by Love & Nudes,should be included in other spaces where people receive health care, even at their local pharmacy.
“The images can be a really powerful thing. When you don’t feel included in the conversation, you just exclude yourself, you don’t think that is a possibility for you … you think ‘that’s a white person’s disease,’” she said.
“We don’t really educate people, that’s what’s needed in medicine in general,” she said.
MILWAUKEE (AP) — Whooping cough is at its highest level in a decade for this time of year, U.S. health officials reported Thursday.
There have been 18,506 cases of whooping cough reported so far, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said. That’s the most at this point in the year since 2014, when cases topped 21,800.
The increase is not unexpected — whooping cough peaks every three to five years, health experts said. And the numbers indicate a return to levels before the coronavirus pandemic, when whooping cough and other contagious illnesses plummeted.
Still, the tally has some state health officials concerned, including those in Wisconsin, where there have been about 1,000 cases so far this year, compared to a total of 51 last year.
Nationwide, CDC has reported that kindergarten vaccination rates dipped last year and vaccine exemptions are at an all-time high. Thursday, it released state figures, showing that about 86% of kindergartners in Wisconsin got the whooping cough vaccine, compared to more than 92% nationally.
Whooping cough, also called pertussis, usually starts out like a cold, with a runny nose and other common symptoms, before turning into a prolonged cough. It is treated with antibiotics. Whooping cough used to be very common until a vaccine was introduced in the 1950s, which is now part of routine childhood vaccinations. It is in a shot along with tetanus and diphtheria vaccines. The combo shot is recommended for adults every 10 years.
“They used to call it the 100-day cough because it literally lasts for 100 days,” said Joyce Knestrick, a family nurse practitioner in Wheeling, West Virginia.
Whooping cough is usually seen mostly in infants and young children, who can develop serious complications. That’s why the vaccine is recommended during pregnancy, to pass along protection to the newborn, and for those who spend a lot of time with infants.
But public health workers say outbreaks this year are hitting older kids and teens. In Pennsylvania, most outbreaks have been in middle school, high school and college settings, an official said. Nearly all the cases in Douglas County, Nebraska, are schoolkids and teens, said Justin Frederick, deputy director of the health department.
That includes his own teenage daughter.
“It’s a horrible disease. She still wakes up — after being treated with her antibiotics — in a panic because she’s coughing so much she can’t breathe,” he said.
It’s important to get tested and treated with antibiotics early, said Dr. Kris Bryant, who specializes in pediatric infectious diseases at Norton Children’s in Louisville, Kentucky. People exposed to the bacteria can also take antibiotics to stop the spread.
“Pertussis is worth preventing,” Bryant said. “The good news is that we have safe and effective vaccines.”
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AP data journalist Kasturi Pananjady contributed to this report.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
How a sperm and egg fuse together has long been a mystery.
New research by scientists in Austria provides tantalizing clues, showing fertilization works like a lock and key across the animal kingdom, from fish to people.
“We discovered this mechanism that’s really fundamental across all vertebrates as far as we can tell,” said co-author Andrea Pauli at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology in Vienna.
The team found that three proteins on the sperm join to form a sort of key that unlocks the egg, allowing the sperm to attach. Their findings, drawn from studies in zebrafish, mice, and human cells, show how this process has persisted over millions of years of evolution. Results were published Thursday in the journal Cell.
Scientists had previously known about two proteins, one on the surface of the sperm and another on the egg’s membrane. Working with international collaborators, Pauli’s lab used Google DeepMind’s artificial intelligence tool AlphaFold — whose developers were awarded a Nobel Prize earlier this month — to help them identify a new protein that allows the first molecular connection between sperm and egg. They also demonstrated how it functions in living things.
It wasn’t previously known how the proteins “worked together as a team in order to allow sperm and egg to recognize each other,” Pauli said.
Scientists still don’t know how the sperm actually gets inside the egg after it attaches and hope to delve into that next.
Eventually, Pauli said, such work could help other scientists understand infertility better or develop new birth control methods.
The work provides targets for the development of male contraceptives in particular, said David Greenstein, a genetics and cell biology expert at the University of Minnesota who was not involved in the study.
The latest study “also underscores the importance of this year’s Nobel Prize in chemistry,” he said in an email.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
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This image shows the inserts Love & Nudes plans to send to customers to highlight how a cancerous lump could appear on various skin tones. (Love & Nudes)
