Constance Boughtwood, 78, with pink items bought to support a Newham hospital's breast cancer team, October 23 2008. Photo by Jean-Baptiste Vey.
By Jean-Baptiste Vey
LONDON, Oct 23 (DocklandsWire) – Nurses dressed in pink sold bright fuchsia bras and rosed-tinted teddy bears at Newham University Hospital on Thursday to raise public awareness of breast cancer, the most common type of the disease in Britain.
Dozens of visitors, most of them women, stopped to take leaflets, buy pink underwear and t-shirts, and chat with the “breast team” around a display in the hospital’s main corridor.
“We encourage people to be aware of their breasts, of any changes they might notice in the size, colour or texture,” said Sally Shanley, a nurse in the hospital’s specialised unit which treats 70 to 80 women every year.
Awareness, she added, is crucial in Newham borough where many do not use the national screening service, which allows every woman above the age of 50 to get a free X-ray test every three years.
“We have a multicultural population and many women don’t discuss things like that. They also might be afraid that, if they come for a mammogram, there might be a man,” Shanley said.
She said only one in two women in East London take the X-ray test when invited, while 90 percent do so in more affluent areas.
By holding pink events every year, the breast team also hopes to make people more comfortable with fighting breast cancer.
“It’s partly that that stopped me from being frightened of coming in,” said 78-year-old Constance Boughtwood, who started treatment seven months ago.
Eighty percent of breast cancer cases occur in women over the age of 50 but the hospital’s staff is increasingly concerned about younger women.
“Something that is unusual to the East end of London is that we diagnose quite a large number of young women with breast cancer,” Shanley said. “We have very rarely seen girls in their teens and we quite regularly now see girls in their twenties.”
According to Cancer Research UK, a charity, 44, 000 women and 300 men are diagnosed with breast cancer each year. The five-year survival rate for the disease is 80 percent and two-thirds of women survive for 20 years or more.
