As a comedian, Dorothy Roe has an easy time seeing the funny side of things, no matter how serious a project is.
“Because I’m funny,” she laughs, telling Global News about her latest project, a cheeky online project. Breast cancer fundraising campaign “Téton Ben Drôle”which features a cartoon-style drawing of a breast with a mastectomy scar, complete with many sporting smiley faces.
“Happy boobs, yeah, guess what,” Law said with a laugh as she translated. “Happy boobs.”
But the former stand-up comedian had a more solemn reason for launching this project. Her mother, Anela Moise, died seven years before her from triple-negative breast cancer. Triple-negative breast cancer is a subtype of the disease that typically grows and spreads rapidly. While researching her existing breast cancer campaigns after her mother’s death, Lo realized that there weren’t many campaigns targeting Black and other racialized women.
Her campaign aims to address this.
Medical experts say triple-negative breast cancer is especially common among young black women, is difficult to treat, and patients have low survival rates. However, it remains a mystery why more women of African descent are affected by the disease.
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“I think there’s a lot more understanding and recognition in Canada that this is one of the overlooked subtypes of breast cancer,” said Dr. Juliette Daniel, a Black cancer biologist at McMaster University. She added: “We cannot and should not sit back and do nothing about this issue, especially when it is disproportionately impacting certain demographics more than others.”
She has been researching this issue for years. In 1999, Barbados-born Daniel discovered the gene and named it Kaiso, after calypso music.
“What we found is that Kaiso is highly expressed in black women with triple-negative breast cancer compared to white women with the same disease,” she told Global News.
More research is needed to determine the link between this gene and prostate cancer and other cancers, she said. Daniel also wants federally mandated collection of race-based data to track triple-negative cancers in this country. “Every hospital collects demographic data on every patient they see and treat,” she said.
Daniel also pointed to another issue.
“We need more black researchers in Canada,” she says. “Many more.”
She added that active researchers like her sometimes have trouble finding funding. She said the first time she applied for funding in Canada to conduct research into triple-negative breast cancer, she was rejected.
“One reviewer said that the study of triple-negative breast cancer in black women in Canada was irrelevant to the Canadian context,” she recalled.
Because of these and other challenges, Roe hopes to raise $200,000 this year alone for triple-negative cancer research through her organization, Audacity of Feminine.
“There are also inequalities in the (medical) field,” said Lau, who is black. “Through this campaign, we want to wake up and shake up people, governments and the medical community that we are also part of public health.”
Some of the funds will come from the sale of Stéphane Senghor’s artwork, but Senghor hears from Daniel that the mortality rate from cancer in sub-Saharan Africa is 50 percent, and that the cancer problem is global. It pointed out.
“I think it’s very important for us as Montreal players to show leadership and communicate to the world, and I think that’s what we’re trying to accomplish with this campaign,” he said.
The fundraiser begins Thursday with a vernissage of Senghor’s work at the Mael Gallery in Old Montreal.
© 2024 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.
