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Breast Cancer Awareness Month has been in full swing for ten days now—but for as much pink as you might be seeing in the world, do you know how this campaign got its start? I’ll admit, I did not, but I’ve since learned that the first ever breast cancer awareness campaign happened in 1985, when the American Cancer Society and a pharmaceutical arm of a company that is now part of AstraZeneca first teamed up to promote mammograms as a detection tool.
While the month can bring its fair share of pink washing and potential triggers for people who have been diagnosed with the disease and aren’t looking for additional reminders of how their lives have changed, the executives of the National Breast Cancer Foundation want people to know that early detection does save lives. NBCF president and COO Kevin Hail and director of communications Ashley Miller made this point when they joined me at Nasdaq MarketSite for an interview earlier this week.
“There’s been a 60% decrease in the mortality rate, which I think indicates we’ve done a good job on early screenings,” Hail says. “If you detect it early, you dramatically increase your chances of survival.”
We also talked about the importance of knowing your family history—and this is a theme that came up in more than one of my interviews this week. I also interviewed Joseph Grzymski, the Chief Genomics Officer for Renown Health;........