African Healthy Woman Project

Thousands of African women die needlessly from breast cancer every year. Recent studies have shown that African women have little access to screening and even less to treatment. Most diagnoses come too late, when the disease is in an advanced state.

In 2005, only a few of the 19,000 women screened were offered follow-up services due to limited access to equipment. Only 55 women underwent mammography, which is the only test for breast cancer that has been shown to decrease the mortality of the disease. A significant number of cancer patients opted out of treatment in favor of non-medical remedies.

In an attempt to remediate this health care crisis, the Colom Foundation is partnering with southern California attorney James Parkinson to bring training and technology to east Africa through the East African Breast Care Project.

Parkinson, along with Colom Foundation founder Wilbur Colom, is trying to put the pieces in place to give Tanzanian women access to both timely diagnosis and modern treatment. The EABCP will bring screening mammography and breast ultrasound technology to Tanzania, and then will work to establish a comprehensive breast cancer clinic in Dar es Salaam.

The goals of the EABCP are to find donors willing to donate screening equipment, to train local doctors and staff in Tanzania, to establish screening and diagnostic services, to train East African surgeons in the most modern techniques and, ultimately, to involve radiation therapists and medical oncologists to provide the best treatment available to these underserved women.

Colom and Parkinson are working with Brett T. Parkinson and Dianne Kane of Intermountain Breast Care Services in Salt Lake City, Utah, to develop the EABCP.