Editorial: Let Angelina Jolie's surgery spark a campaign

South Jersey Times By South Jersey Times South Jersey Newspapers
on May 19, 2013 at 3:11 AM
njo-angelina-jolie.jpgAngelina Jolie

In a culture as obsessed with celebrity and conscious of health care as our own, Angelina Jolie’s revelation last week that she chose to avoid the breast cancer that killed her mother by having her breasts surgically removed is a shocking reminder of the grim toll of this disease on American women.

Few could afford, and few would choose, the brave but inordinately expensive route to breast cancer prevention that Jolie has taken; nevertheless, her proactive attempt to control a genetic predisposition toward developing this deadly disease spotlights the need for more research and prevention efforts.

Despite a potential affect on 52 percent of the American population, despite an ever increasing number of deaths each year of women in the prime of life, breast cancer still has no generally agreed upon cause or cure.

It is the most common form of cancer in women and the second most fatal, following lung cancer which has declined sharply in men due to massive anti-smoking initiatives. An effort launched from the White House some 40 years ago promptly identified cigarette smoking, along with other tobacco products, as the primary cause of lung cancer. Federal officials mounted a national campaign, not only to warn tobacco users but also to discourage potential users by restricting smoking in public places, raising taxes on tobacco products and forbidding cigarette sales to youth. Eventually, many states backed up the national anti-smoking push.

The results are an unparalleled success. While far too many people still use tobacco, only one in five American adults now smokes cigarettes regularly, a rate that has declined since the 1970s and that was at an all-time low last year.

Never before in history has a commercial product known to cause a deadly disease in such great numbers been so successfully controlled. Today, those who do smoke are aware of the risks.

What’s needed is a similar federal campaign to identify the primary causes of breast cancer and control them as well, whatever they are, be they environmental, as often rumored; or behavioral, as sometimes feared; or medicinal, as some research has suggested: The result of indiscriminate access to hormones that attempt to control the physical realities of womanhood: menstruation, pregnancy, birth and breast milk, as well as their decline at mid-life.

You can’t fool Mother Nature, but it’s quite possible that American women have been led to believe that you can. Angelina Jolie knows the truth. The American people must know it as well.