Ending breast cancer, one pair of ta-tas at a time

Know what's really a drag? Breast cancer. It affects 1 out of every 8 women in the United States, killing over 40,000 women a year. But let's not forget whom else breast cancer affects: people who love boobs!

This seems to be the message behind Save the Ta-Tas, a new campaign to raise money for breast cancer research. Save the Ta-Tas was started by fashion designer Julia Fiske, who, according to the company's web site, "learned the value of accepting and loving oneself no matter your appearance" when her grandmother lost both breasts to cancer several years ago. While Save the Ta-Tas has given more than $350,000 to breast cancer organizations, Fiske's equivocal messaging--Love your body no matter what! End breast cancer so you can keep your boobs!--paints a confusing picture as to who benefits when we fight cancer.

Save the Ta-Tas offers a bevy of sexualizing T-shirts with slogans like "I love my big ta-tas!" and "Caught you lookin' at my ta-tas" for women and "My girl has great ta-tas" and "Save a life, grope your wife" for men. While it's true that mastectomies can wreak havoc on cancer survivor's notions of their own femininity, the problem with the Save the Ta-Tas campaign is that it boils the breast cancer fight down to a fight for boobs. The real reason to end breast cancer is to save women's lives. -Naomi (Thanks to Yandary for the tip.)

Rape as a weapon of war

Last month the world shuddered at news of mass rape in Guinea. Reporter Ofeibea Quist-Arcton interviewed survivors, and her moving account of these conversations is on NPR.

Rape is finally getting the much-needed international attention it deserves.  Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has brought attention to the scourge of sexual violence in Congo, known as the "rape capital of the world." Clinton is already spinning the dialogue toward constructive purposes. She wants to see women more actively included in peacekeeping efforts and community building, and said that "women have tremendous potential to be peacemakers and peacekeepers," although they are frequently excluded from such efforts. -Sara

Gender and the recession

According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the economic recession isn't gender neutral. The data generally shows a favorable picture when it comes to working women: their wages rose 3.2% compared to 2% for men over the past 2 years, and men are filing for unemployment in greater numbers.

It's not quite so rosy, though. Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute think tank told the Wall Street Journal that "this is a situation where everyone's losing but men are losing more, and that's not really a victory for women."

And even when it comes to number crunching, women are still discriminated against in the workplace. The BLS data found that women earn less than men. Even if this data shows that women are weathering the downturn better than men in the workforce, they didn't start out with equal footing, and as the Wall Street Journal says of the data, "but men still earned more." -Sara

HPV vaccine approved for boys

The Gardasil vaccine for the HPV strains that are known to cause cervical cancer in women was approved for use in boys and young men by the FDA yesterday. According to Merck & Co., the maker of Gardasil, about 8 million girls and women in the US received the vaccine from 2006 to 2008.

The vaccine has been criticized for its high cost ($390 for the three dose vaccine, according to the Wall Street Journal) in combination with aggressive marketing by Merck. Analysts are already predicting that Merck stands to boost its sales by up to $300 million annually with the expanded use of the Gardasil vaccine in boys. BusinessWeek noted that Gardasil sales were at $1.4 billion last year, but controversy surrounding the vaccine has only grown since it was introduced to the market, and sales dropped by 5% in 2008. I would be surprised to see Gardasil marketed to men as an altruistic vaccine to protect their female sexual partners; more likely, it will focus on wart-prevention for men.

Offering the vaccine to men may appear to transcend gender when it comes to sharing the burden for cervical cancer prevention. But questions on the overall effectiveness of Gardasil have emerged, and several experts say that pap screening is still the most effective way to protect against cervical cancer--a burden that men do not share. Cervical cancer prevention is inequitable on an international scale, as well. The LA Times reported that cervical cancer kills more than 280,000 women worldwide every year. Comparatively, the threat domestically is small due to regular pap tests, where 11,000 women are diagnosed and 3,700 die from cervical cancer every year. This is not to say that we should simply overlook American women because they die in disproportionately small numbers, but that the vaccine and the profits with which it is associated do not target the population most in need.

Side effects went undetected in Merck's trials, but have been cropping up since Gardasil was approved, says the LA Times article. The Alliance for Human Research Protection claims that "Gardasil’s risks are borne by the girls and women vaccinated: its benefit clearly goes to Merck."

In the Journal of the American Medical Association last month, Columbia University professors Sheila M. and David J. Rothman took issue with Merck's marketing tactics and wrote that "By making the vaccine's target disease cervical cancer, the sexual transmission of HPV was minimized, the threat of cervical cancer to adolescents was maximized, and the subpopulations most at risk practically ignored." In addition, they point out that Merck funded several professional medical associations that then encouraged vaccine use.

Merck's ambitions are profit, more than altruism-driven. This is no different than other pharmaceutical companies' ambitions (made clearer now than ever as the nation debates health care costs), but the prevalence of a new vaccine that may or may not be effective long term, may or may not have harmful side affects, and may or may not be as effective as pap screening is not a silver bullet solution. It also overlooks the international population that may benefit the most from such a vaccine. However, the FDA's decision yesterday to include men in preventing HPV could be a step toward inclusivity and may be successful at beginning to shift the burden of protecting women's health to all of us.  -Sara