Senate Approves National Mammography Day

On July 12, the Senate approved, by unanimous consent, a resolution (S. Res. 508) designating October 20, 2006, as “National Mammography Day.”

Sponsored by Sen. Joseph Biden (D-DE), the resolution contains a number of findings, including the following:

• according to the American Cancer Society, in 2005, 212,930 women will be diagnosed with breast cancer and 40,410 women will die from this disease;
• it is estimated that about 2 million women were diagnosed with breast cancer in the 1990s, and that in nearly 500,000 of those cases, the cancer resulted in death;
• African-American women suffer a 30 percent greater mortality rate from breast cancer than white women and more than a 100 percent greater mortality rate from breast cancer than women from Hispanic, Asian, and American Indian populations;
• the risk of breast cancer increases with age, with a woman at age 70 having twice as much of a chance of developing the disease as a woman at age 50; and
• mammography is an excellent method for early detection of localized breast cancer, which has a 5-year survival rate of more than 97 percent.Sen. Biden urged women to schedule periodic mammograms, saying: “Early detection of breast cancer continues to result in extremely favorable outcomes: 97 percent of women with localized breast cancer will survive 5 years or longer. New digital techniques make the process of mammography much more rapid and precise than before. Government programs will provide free mammograms to those who can’t afford them, as well as Medicaid eligibility for treatment if breast cancer is diagnosed.” He added, “So I am feeling quite positive about our battle against breast cancer. A diagnosis of breast cancer is not a death sentence, and I encounter long-term survivors of breast cancer nearly daily.”