It seems like it could be a win-win situation for everyone. Planned Parenthood gets scads of new donations, the issue of breast cancer and abortion is front-page news, and the Komen Foundation can ride on the wave of having tried to do the right thing by the hardline, anti-abortion rightwingers. Then they can backtrack due to the intense public pressure. Wow, what a savvy move!

The mantra of the nursing student is "know your community resources". As a nurse for 30 years, I've found nothing to dispute in that idea. You've got to know which community agencies will help your patients.

But when charitable agencies are charged with being a venue through which essential health care comes, there is ALWAYS fine print. I am a big girl and I understand why this is. You are trying to create accountability. You are trying to hit your target population. There's only so much resource and it can only go so far.

But in the year 2112, women of a certain age should get breast exams and mammos if they need them. Period. We cannot prevent breast cancer but we can practice early case finding. There's not a practicing health care provider in womens' care or primary care that would dispute that.

And yet because we do not have mandated primary care for all, a poor woman's access to ordinary health care is a minefield of "maybe's". Maybe you'll get care if you live near to a Planned Parenthood or public health department. Maybe you'll get care if they get a grant. Maybe you'll get care if your employer will let you go during their business hours. Maybe you'll get care if someone doesn't tie your essential health care service to...abortion...or whatever the cause du jour is.
Maybe you'll get thei pieces of your care if you can go HERE for your breast exam, THERE for your cholesterol screen, THERE for your flu shot, HERE for your blood pressure eval. No one stop shopping for the poor. Their care is as fragmented as possible, almost as if you have to run the gauntlet to prove your desire for health care.

Ultimately, there will always be a well intentioned Komen Foundation organization who provides charitable care but then gets targeted by some agendized group. Let them be.

Support Universal Health Care FOR ALL!

Remember to the religious far right their concern for life begins at conception, and ends at birth. Protect the fetus, but do away with social programs and human rights for anyone that has cleared the birth canal, and always love a good war.

The religious right says they walk in the footsteps of Jesus, so I guess this is what Jesus would do. What a bastard he must have been.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn10971

>>It sounds almost too good to be true: a cheap and simple drug that kills almost all cancers by switching off their "immortality". The drug, dichloroacetate (DCA), has already been used for years to treat rare metabolic disorders and so is known to be relatively safe.

>>It also has no patent, meaning it could be manufactured for a fraction of the cost of newly developed drugs.

>>Evangelos Michelakis of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, and his colleagues tested DCA on human cells cultured outside the body and found that it killed lung, breast and brain cancer cells, but not healthy cells. Tumours in rats deliberately infected with human cancer also shrank drastically when they were fed DCA-laced water for several weeks.

Now accepting the accuracy of this article and the promise of this new old drug, why would any firm or organization interesting in combatting Cancer not be all over this?

It obvious that it because it will offer little in the way of profits. Just as example a common off the shelf drug that sold fer pennies a dose that was found to treat Glaucoma was pulled off the market and "re-patented" by a firm under a different name (this allowed under copyright/trademark and patent laws) and now sells for 10000$ a dose.

Quite frankly i see little to no GOOD coming out of our patent, trademark and copyright laws. I really do not see why some firm should profit off anothers misfortune in the great scheme of things.

Today we even see firms patenting or trademarking words and phrases and our own language. Use "trump" or "Macdonalds" in a advertisement and you will be sued. Use a phrase like "eat more Kale" and some firm will take you to court.

The entire concept of "intellectual property rights" has gotten out of hand. This laws are one of the single largest drivers of ever higher health care costs in EVERY state including those with Universal health Care.

Are there no Salks left in the world today?

Does this mean that, under a Republican administration, all the benighted Afghani and Arab Muslim women we free (of their husbands, brothers, fathers and sons, and sometimes of their own lives), won't quite yet enjoy the freedom to choose? Perhaps they're "not ready" yet.

(PS: I think The Nation needs a little more quality control of their headline writers:
"The Komen Foundation Pinkwashes Anti-choicers, Punks Planned Parenthood" Ouch.)

This controversy is the result of religion controlling science. The same religious hypocrisy is supported by anyone who is part of any of the major patriarchal religions.

The catholics played a significant part in this move by the Komen Foundation and there are loads of democrats, as well as republicans, who are catholic.

Do not assume that this is only a republican supported corruption.

Christians did this. Not that other equally deviant religious people don't support this move, but it goes beyond one political party.

In the bigger picture the problem is that in the US Health Care is not a right and poorer women rely on charity to filll the need for breast exams. A principle of charity is that it is a voluntary initiative on the part of the donor. The Komen foundation has the right to do whatever it wants with its money and can be as arbitrary as it wants. This is the reason we have to assert health care which is a fundamental human need as a Human Right and use the institution of government to secure it. I despair that this will ever happen in the USA, we're just not decent enough as a society to demand it. In place of a Right, we satisfy ourselves with a charity. The consequent injustice and unneeded suffering which that choice entails is all to evident but rather than confront it we shrug and tell ourselves it's the best we can do. In fact we congradulate ourselves, Republican style, on our charity and see it as a virtue. It is the politics of bad faith-- which more or less summarizes all of American Politics.

They caved. Democratic Senators wrote them a letter urging them to reverse their decision and they did.

Although the cutting of the funding has now been reversed, I find it interesting that the "for the cure" crowd is primarily interested not in a cure but in fund-raising. Meat consumption increases the risk of breast and other cancers such as prostate cancer in men, but I've never heard that fact mentioned by the "cure" crowd. This is copied from from a website found by googling breat cancer and meat consumption.:
Breast Cancer

Countries with a higher intake of fat, especially fat from animal products, such as meat and dairy products, have a higher incidence of breast cancer.13,14,15 In Japan, for example, the traditional diet is much lower in fat, especially animal fat, than the typical western diet, and breast cancer rates are low. In the late 1940s, when breast cancer was particularly rare in Japan, less than 10 percent of the calories in the Japanese diet came from fat.16 The American diet is centered on animal products, which tend to be high in fat and low in other important nutrients, with 30 to 35 percent of calories coming from fat. When Japanese girls are raised on westernized diets, their rate of breast cancer increases dramatically. Even within Japan, affluent women who eat meat daily have an 8.5 times higher risk of breast cancer than poorer women who rarely or never eat meat.17 One of the proposed reasons is that fatty foods boost the hormones that promote cancer.

The consumption of high-fat foods such as meat, dairy products, fried foods, and even vegetable oils causes a woman’s body to make more estrogens, which encourage cancer cell growth in the breast and other organs that are sensitive to female sex hormones. This suggests that, by avoiding fatty foods throughout life, hormone-related cancer risk decreases. A 2003 study, published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, found that when girls ages eight to ten reduced the amount of fat in their diet—even very slightly—their estrogen levels were held at a lower and safer level during the next several years. By increasing vegetables, fruits, grains, and beans, and reducing animal-derived foods, the amount of estradiol (a principal estrogen) in their blood dropped by 30 percent, compared to a group of girls who did not change their diets.18

Harvard researchers recently conducted a prospective analysis of 90,655 premenopausal women, ages 26 to 46, enrolled in the Nurses’ Health Study II and determined that intake of animal fat, especially from red meat and high-fat dairy products, during premenopausal years is associated with an increased risk of breast cancer. Increased risk was not associated with vegetable fats.19

In addition, researchers at the Ontario Cancer Institute conducted a meta-analysis of all the case-control and cohort studies published up to July 2003 that studied dietary fat, fat-containing foods, and breast cancer risk. Case-control and cohort study analyses yielded similar risk results, with a high total fat intake associated with increased breast cancer risk. Significant relative risks for meat and saturated fat intake also emerged, with high meat intake increasing cancer risk by 17 percent and high saturated fat intake increasing cancer risk by 19 percent.20

Several studies show meat intake to be a breast cancer risk factor, even when confounding factors, such as total caloric intake and total fat intake, are controlled.21,22 Part of the reason may be that meat becomes a source of carcinogens and/or mutagens, such as HCAs, that are formed while cooking meat at high temperatures. A review of HCAs showed that certain HCAs are distributed to the mammary gland and that humans can activate HCAs metabolically.23 As a consequence, frequent meat consumption may be a risk factor for breast cancer.21

(End of quote) So a vegetarian diet may not prevent all cancers, but it knocks the chances of acquiring cancer way down. I will contribute to "the cure" only when they tell the truth about meat and stop looking for a mircle cure that ignores the consequences of eating slaughtered animals tha were full of life when their throats were slashed.

As a follow-up to my charge that the cure crowd ignores the meat-cancer connection, here is the list of risk factors pubished by the Komen Foundation, copied from its website:
•Age
•Being female
•Inherited genetic mutations
•Family history of breast, ovarian or prostate cancer
•Breast density on mammogram
•Benign breast conditions (benign breast disease, hyperplasia)
•Lobular carcinoma in situ (LCIS)
•Personal history of cancer (including invasive breast cancer, DCIS, Hodgkin's disease and other cancers)
•Radiation treatment (radiation exposure)
•Childbearing (age at first birth and number of children)
•Blood estrogen levels
•Age at first period
•Age at menopause
•Drinking alcohol
•Ashkenazi Jewish heritage
•Body weight and weight gain
•Birth control pill use
•Height
•Socioeconomic status
•Postmenopausal hormone use
•Breastfeeding
•Blood androgen levels
•Bone density
•Light at night and shift work
•Exercise (physical activity)
•Breast cancer risk factors table
Not a word about meat! This is a charity I would never support. They are just playing the fund-raising, resume-building game, and they don't want to offend the meat industry.

There hasn't been massive protests against the right wing mullahs in state legislatures who have been passing laws forcing women to have babies but for some reason there is now an outcry against this latest step towards theocracy. I have a strange feeling that this foundation is not as kosher as its image would have us believe.

I can't count the number of former Komen supporters I know who pulled the plug on the organization as a result of this PP funding BS, and, in spite of Komen's reversal on that funding, will never go back. The powers-that-be at Komen are not only right-wing loons, they are also just plain stupid, and are unworthy of anything beyond this point except relegation to the scrapheap of history!

The Susan B. Komen foundation caved to the bad publicity and announced it will restore funding to Planned Parenthood. The power of negative publicity.

I believe this is a temporary triumph, not a victory. The right wing assault on women's reproductive services will continue. My thought is that what they're really against is birth control of all kinds, that abortion gets the lion's share of their verbal abuse because that's the most hot button birth control method. They're not pro life, they're anti sex. They want to reverse the sexual revolution as a way to put uppity women back where so-called "conservatives" think they should be.

Let's face it, neither conservatives nor progressives are consistent when it comes to respect for human life. Conservatives speak out against the killing of unborn children, but then remain silent as 45,000 people die each year from lack of universal health care and militate for the cutting of vital social services needed by the most vulnerable members of our society. On the other hand, progressives defend the vulnerable except for the most vulnerable component of the human family. There is nothing progressive about saying that human lives, with (after 10 weeks) a beating heart, brainwaves and a capacity for feeling pain should be disposable up until delivery. Planned Parenthood is a big business and the core of its business is the abortion industry through which it destroys 300,000 human lives each year. To quote the motto of the Consistent Life movement, "No violence to our earth. No violence to our unborn. No violence to our partners. No violence to our enemies. No violence to our children. No violence to our prisoners. No violence to our dying. No violence. Period." What is so hard about embracing an ethic of "No violence period."? We have become a society that says to poor women "We won't give you an adequate job, or a decent place to live, or health care, but if you want to get rid of your child so there aren't more of you, you have our full support." The progressive movement nees to embrace the value of ALL human life, both women and children, and by children I mean at all stages, not just at the "magical" moment when she or he emerges from the birth canal. To learn more and to make a positive difference, please google "consistent life."

Planned Parenthood needs to show how the $ 365 million in taxpayer dollars are Not spent on abortion "services" every year. PP needs to show how victims of statutory rape are routinely reported to local authorities. PP needs to explain the meaning of the word "choice" as it applies to the medical procedure of killing innocent life. PP needs to explain how women's lives are saved when they butcher over 500,000 girls a year! The response from NARAL, of course, will never come because death in their world is not a sign of eternal.....

Peace

What we need to be focusing on is PREVENTION of cancer, not ribbons and marches for "curing" it, which is all about expensive treatments pushed by Big Pharma and the insurance companies.

Read more at Transition Times, "Turn Those Pink Ribbons Green": http://bethechange2012.wordpress.com/2012/02/03/turn-those-pink-ribbons-green/

I find it quite unsettling that rarely does anyone mention the ENVIRONMENTAL contributors to breast cancer (and other types of cancer).

Instead, we hear about personal behaviors like meat-eating, as though changing our diets would be sufficient to prevent cancer.

How can we forget the many (SO many!) cancer-causing contaminants (chemicals, etc.) in our air, water & soil? And what about exposure to radionuclides? Now that we've had almost 70 years of radioactive materials in the environment, it can't be a coincidence that cancer is on the rise. Wouldn't cancer be the logical, ultimate result of eating, drinking and breathing carcinogens? It's too late to avoid exposure to all of these contributing factors- they are ever present. Better to soothe people with fictitious hopes for a "cure".

The Komen Foundation is guilty of (aside from unleashing obnoxious pink consumer products on us all) keeping public attention away from a deeper understanding of the causes of cancer. If only PP could say no to ANY reliance on Komen's funds.

I don't know what it will take for American women to wake up to the fact that there is a war against them by right wing theocrats in both parties. Unfortunately too many women have fallen victim to religious scams and are too tolerant of the born again fascists that want to control their bodies. It looks like many women will be driven out of the United States just to find reproductive services and abortions.