What is causing the rise of breast cancer in poor countries?
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
