They were there to make a point. And they couldn’t have been more clear. Where you live should not determine if you live.
On a gray, rainy day in Washington, D.C., 12 ACS CAN volunteers from across the county met with their members of Congress and laid out the path Congress should take to help end all deaths from cervical cancer.
Each day, more than 750 women die from cervical cancer in low-and middle-income countries. The tragedy is that these deaths are preventable.
Joyous Moody, an Arizona cervical cancer survivor, was walking proof. Despite her disease being caught at a very late stage, Joyous was able to receive the necessary treatment and survive a diagnosis that would almost certainly have killed a woman in a poorer country.
Meanwhile, 16 year-old Kieryn Hewitt, an ACS CAN volunteer from New Hampshire, told a different story. She has received the HPV vaccine and thus knows she is highly unlikely to ever receive a cervical cancer diagnosis. She also knows that this relatively inexpensive vaccine isn’t available to millions of girls around the world who could die from cervical cancer without it.
We have the rare opportunity to actually eliminate deaths from cervical cancer. Imagine, nearly wiping a type of cancer death out of existence.
That’s why Joyous, Kieryn and so many other ACS CAN volunteers are asking Congress to fund the cervical cancer prevention, screening and treatment tools for women in countries with little or no access to such lifesaving measures.
You can join the campaign by sending a message to your members of Congress and asking them to support funding to help end all deaths from cervical cancer.
After months of delay and hard negotiations, Congress has finally passed a funding bill! The bill includes a small increase for cancer research and prevention programs.