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 suggests that breast cancer seems to strike women, on average, about 10 years younger in poor countries than it does in the U.S. 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 where "the women are often seen as really either vessels for producing children or as sex slaves."
But some success in treating HIV and tuberculosis in those areas has him "hopeful we can make a difference. I don't think it's a pipe dream."
Tuesday, Knaul and Shulman bring together 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.
