The 2nd Thing You Can Do to Help End Breast Cancer this October

— NBCC President, Fran Visco 2012During the month of October, there are an overwhelming number of organizations trying to get our attention and donation with their pink ribbon campaigns.  As a breast cancer survivor, I’ve been confused about which of the organizations to contribute to, because there are so many and there seems to be so much overlap among them.  Frankly for me, since I have a young daughter, the most important thing is to support organizations who are focused on finding a way to prevent breast cancer from occurring in the first place. 

Let’s find a vaccine for women so that they never have to have mammograms, or MRI’s, or ultrasounds; so that they never have to have lumpectomies, chemo, radiation, mastectomies and reconstruction. All of these things are valid ways to treat the existence of breast cancer, but are treatments for an existing condition. Let’s set our focus on figuring out how to stop breast cancer from occurring.  But, there aren’t really that many organizations out there who have prevention as their primary focus.

The National Breast Cancer Coalition is an organization focused on ending breast cancer.  In fact, they’ve drawn a line in the sand with an intention to do so by 2020.  It’s a pretty bold declaration, but they have the right strategy and tools in place to accomplish this impressive goal.   NBCC advocates believe breast cancer will be eradicated by focusing efforts on two key areas including: learning how to stop breast cancer metastasis from taking lives and learning how to prevent the disease from developing in the first place. 

The National Breast Cancer Deadline 2020 focuses on 4 key areas: public policy; research and collaboration (key word here is collaboration, it’s amazing how much information is NOT shared across the world of cancer research and NBCC is working to bring key thought leaders and researchers together); quality care and advocacy training.

So here’s the 2nd thing you can do this October (the first was to register in Dr. Susan Love’s Army of Women) to help eradicate breast cancer.  Click on the link here and join The National Breast Cancer Coalition in their Breast Cancer Deadline 2020.  Our daughters will thank you for it, one day.