Breast cancer has become a major health challenge worldwide and requires huge efforts to catch the disease at the early stages, Dr Hanif Hassan, UAE Minister of Health, said.
He was speaking at the launch of a nation-wide campaign in United Arab Emirates that underscores the importance of early detection and will run from Sunday to Thursday, November 11.
Hassan said 84,000 women have been provided clinical tests since the screening programme was initiated in 1998. He said it is one of the leading programmes not only in the UAE but in the Gulf and Arab countries.
"WHO [World Health Organisation] studies show that breast cancer is a challenge for health systems all over the world and requires cooperation of all parties to fight the disease," he said.
Early detection has helped bring down the number of deaths and this year the National Screening Programme intends to drive home the point to women that early screening is the most effective intervention that leads to a 95 per cent cure rate, according to Dr Hajar Al Hosani, director of the national screening programme.
She said breast cancer is the second cause of death among women in the UAE.
The director did not mince her words when she announced that despite the various gains in the fields there are still drawbacks, including a shortage of local expertise in the field of screening mammography.
The other drawback is the lack of a population registry (of breast cancer cases). There are also cultural and socio-educational barriers for accepting breast screening, she said.
The target population of the screening programme will be women over the age of 40 and about over 240,000 women will be screened, which is about 15 of the total women's population (according to the 2009 statistics).
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