Word: breast
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...found, timely follow-up visits are difficult for the mammography teams, so it is left to the woman to visit a hospital. Often she won't. "If you live 60 km from a clinic and you feel a lump and it's painless," asks Dr. Aaron Ndhluni, a private breast surgeon in Cape Town, "are you going to walk...
...Money is a problem too. In Egypt, mammograms cost about $50, in many cases a month's income. Onyango, the Kenyan breast-cancer survivor, remembers that when her doctor told her she should have a mammogram, her first thought was, "How much will it cost?" The answer may be only $20 in Kenya, but for people who live on less than $1 a day, that could easily be out of reach...
...called for the introduction of mammography for all women over 50. As of 2005, only 7% of women follow that recommendation. The price tag of a single machine is about $262,000, and a mammogram generally costs a patient $90 out of her own pocket. Says Dr. Fujio Kasumi, breast-cancer chief at Juntendo University Hospital: "People don't do [tests], thinking it's a waste of money...
...than 50% of patients have mastectomies, mostly because they are afraid of secondary cancers. Frequently, such radical surgery is the only option offered a patient. When Ye Danyang, a 41-year-old editor at Beijing TV, found a tumor in 2002, doctors hinted that her resolve to preserve her breast was to choose beauty over life. And, in most cases, a mastectomy is cheaper. "A lumpectomy requires additional, expensive treatment," Xu, the Beijing surgeon, says bluntly. "Patients believe, with a mastectomy, you cut off the breasts for $125, and they're done...
...Chemotherapy decisions are similarly dictated by pocketbook considerations. The greater likelihood of ER-negative breast cancer in Africans and Asians means that such drugs as the estrogen blockers are not on the menu of pharmaceutical options. That rules out one of the cheapest and most available breast-cancer drugs in Africa: a $150-a-dose generic version of tamoxifen (and even that would be far too expensive for many women). Traditional chemotherapy may cost $20,000 or more. Merely determining which type of cancer a woman has may require genetic testing, which can add an additional...