Gwyn: El Oh El! :-)
*reads site* So should we turn our websites brown next month for colon cancer too? I mean, it kills more people here (america/canada) each year than breast cancer does. What about grey for lung cancer, which kills 50% more people than the other two combined? I joke, but it brings up something that always bothered me. People co-opting an entire month for a single cause. I know just about every minor cause in the world tries to declare it's own week-of-this, or month-of-that, but for some reason breast cancer is the one that gets lots of lavish public attention. It gets stamps from the post office, fundraisers on TV, big fancy dinners, etc. To me, it seems the reason for this is that breast cancer kills rich, white women, who aren't likely to die from much else. In high-income countries, breast cancer only accounts for 1.9% of all deaths (9th ranked cause of death.) It doesn't even show up statistically in middle and low-income countries. Worldwide, literally 9 times as many people die from diarrhea each year as from breast cancer, and even that isn't in the top 5 causes of death... not even in the poorest countries. (Check out
http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs310/en/index3.html to put things in perspective.) The sad part is that we have cures for the diarrheal diseases, the people who need them just can't afford them. Yet we throw tons of money each year at TRYING to find a cure for a cancer that kills a tiny fraction of the people that the curable diseases do. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying stop cancer research, it's just that I have a problem with the sheer (and disproportionate) amount of fundraising that's done for breast cancer. Don't come beg me for money to save old rich people.
Sorry for the rant, and I really hope I don't offend anyone who's had their own life affected by breast cancer. It is a serious disease that kills our loved ones, and I don't mean to belittle that pain and loss. I've just been reading a lot of information for my trip to India in a couple days, a lot of it on diseases and how to protect myself from them. It's scares me a bit to be needing preventive anti-malaria meds just for a 10-day trip, and when I see what the people who live there have to worry about all the time... I'm just saying, the majority of the world is
lucky if they can live long enough to worry about breast cancer.
Griever: Sorry... I didn't mean to hijack your topic or dismiss the idea. It just got me thinking on things and I got carried away. Don't let my stupid rant stop you (or anyone) from supporting/promoting charity. Any effort with noble purpose is always a good one.
