Our Nah Leav­ing Denyse Plum­mer, left this earth pre­ma­ture­ly on Au­gust 27. She lost her fight against breast can­cer.

Her songs were an an­them to women and na­tion­als who refuse to aban­don our beau­ti­ful coun­try.

Can­cer, like crime, is a fac­tor which can cheat us from the com­pa­ny of our loved ones. I had an aunt who lost the bat­tle with breast can­cer, she left three young sons be­hind.

My wife, Dr Sherene Kalloo, says the most dif­fi­cult task for her as a doc­tor is to look a pa­tient in the eye and tell her that she has can­cer.

I have al­so had to coun­sel pa­tients and their rel­a­tives. A can­cer di­ag­no­sis can bring feel­ings of shock, de­nial, fear, anger, and de­pres­sion. It is a dif­fi­cult time when one has to come to terms with their own mor­tal­i­ty, missed op­por­tu­ni­ties and leav­ing loved ones be­hind. Some women wor­ry that they would not be around to as­sist their chil­dren in times of need.

Some sur­vivors adopt the role of preach­ing a healthy lifestyle and as­sist­ing oth­er sur­vivors.

We must be proud of these sur­vivors who, de­spite their psy­cho­log­i­cal shock, have been able to con­tin­ue to serve their fel­low men. We got gospel songs from Denyse which lift­ed the spir­it of many.

In our coun­try, breast can­cer is the most com­mon can­cer among women, the in­ci­dence is 37 per 100,000 pop­u­la­tion and WHO says one in eight women over their life­time will de­vel­op it.

A ma­ter­nal fam­i­ly his­to­ry of breast can­cer, obe­si­ty, smok­ing, al­co­hol use, the com­mence­ment of men­stru­a­tion be­fore 12 years and the on­set of menopause af­ter 50 years, hav­ing a first ba­by af­ter 30 years or hav­ing no chil­dren, hor­mon­al con­tra­cep­tion, and work­ing night shifts in­creas­es the risk to de­vel­op breast can­cer. Pro­tec­tive fac­tors are breast­feed­ing and hav­ing more than three chil­dren be­fore 30.

A WHO me­dia re­lease on Oc­to­ber 20, 2021, stat­ed that the WHO Eu­ro­pean Re­gion has the high­est rate of new breast can­cer di­ag­noses com­pared to any of the oth­er WHO re­gions.

The In­ter­na­tion­al Agency for Re­search on Can­cer (IARC) wrote that ‘al­co­hol con­sump­tion was re­spon­si­ble for al­most 40,000 new breast can­cer cas­es in the re­gion’.

The re­lease stat­ed, “There is no safe lev­el of al­co­hol con­sump­tion. The risk of breast can­cer in­creas­es with each unit of al­co­hol con­sumed per day. More than 10% of al­co­hol-at­trib­ut­able can­cer cas­es in the re­gion arise from drink­ing just one bot­tle of beer (500 ml) or two small glass­es of wine (100 ml each) every day. For breast can­cer, this is even high­er: 1 in 4 al­co­hol-at­trib­ut­able breast can­cer cas­es in the re­gion is caused by this amount.”

Dr Mar­ilys Cor­bex, Se­nior Tech­ni­cal Of­fi­cer for Non­com­mu­ni­ca­ble Dis­eases at WHO/Eu­rope, said,“Many peo­ple, in­clud­ing women, are not aware that breast can­cer is the most com­mon can­cer caused by al­co­hol among women glob­al­ly. Peo­ple need to know that by re­duc­ing al­co­hol con­sump­tion they can re­duce their risk of get­ting can­cer.”

Al­co­hol is clas­si­fied as a Group 1 hu­man car­cino­gen by IARC and is linked to can­cers of the oral cav­i­ty, phar­ynx, oe­soph­a­gus, liv­er, lar­ynx, and col­orec­tal.

As a pre­ventable pub­lic health mea­sure, we have to tar­get al­co­hol con­sump­tion.

The re­gion­al health au­thor­i­ties have start­ed do­ing more spe­cial screen­ing ses­sions. The Can­cer So­ci­ety al­so has mo­bile units per­form­ing pap smears, breast ex­ams, and prostate ex­am­i­na­tions. We may need to con­sid­er mam­mog­ra­phy mo­bile units to reach out to women in rur­al ar­eas.

In Oc­to­ber 2002, the then prime min­is­ter Patrick Man­ning promised us a Na­tion­al On­col­o­gy Cen­tre at the Mt Hope Hos­pi­tal. In March 2007, the gov­ern­ment took a $150 mil­lion loan from the In­ter-Amer­i­can De­vel­op­ment Bank to build this. Fif­teen months lat­er and af­ter $120 mil­lion was spent, the project was halt­ed af­ter a con­flict arose with the Cana­di­an man­age­ment firm El­lis­Don Con­sult­ing.

In 2012, the Peo­ple’s Part­ner­ship gov­ern­ment at­tempt­ed to let Ude­cott fin­ish the project for $800 mil­lion.

In 2017, the new PNM ad­min­is­tra­tion des­ig­nat­ed $575 mil­lion for Ude­cott un­der the chair­man­ship of Noel Gar­cia to com­plete it in one year.

In Feb­ru­ary 2019, the Min­is­ter of Health dis­con­tin­ued the project af­ter over one bil­lion of tax­pay­ers’ dol­lars were al­ready spent on this failed project.

The elec­tion and bud­getary promis­es of the three ad­min­is­tra­tions failed to de­liv­er.

In the past, the gov­ern­ment has spent mil­lions of dol­lars to sub­sidise pa­tient treat­ment at the pri­vate on­col­o­gy cen­tres. St James Hos­pi­tal al­so pro­vides free ser­vices.

Two days ago, our Min­is­ter of Health an­nounced that the Au­gus­tus Long Hos­pi­tal will be­come a new on­col­o­gy cen­tre un­der the SWRHA.

If the min­is­ter can de­liv­er this cen­tre, as Denyse would sing, the flow­ers would in­deed bloom again for some of our can­cer pa­tients.