Breast Cancer Vaccine: Safe and Highly Effective

October is Breast Cancer Awareness month. All over the country people are being inundated with information about detection, treatment, and research. Pink is the color, and awareness is the flavor of the month. You are probably hearing about everything from how to do a self breast exam to stats about survival rates.

The focus seems to be on everything about breast cancer except one thing. The one thing that could save your life and the life of someone you love. It's the one thing that's readily available, researched-based, proven effective, and 100% safe. Common sense would dictate that this would be the central focus of the discussion, so why isn't this happening?

Perhaps I'm the only one that feels this way. Maybe it's because the whole issue has hit too close to home, too many times. My youngest aunt has been fighting the battle for years now and at times I wonder how much worse it could possible get for her. What I wonder about the most is whether anyone ever told her about how to avoid wondering whether she'll be around to see both her kids graduate from high school.

Before she was diagnosed, I'm sure she had heard all about mammograms, research, self-exams, and clinical trials. But I have a sneaking suspicion that that's where the information ended. Of course now it's too late to let her in on the news she could have and should have heard over and over.

That would be the news about the breast cancer vaccine. It's a safe, effective, dose of prevention that's self-administered every day over the course of one's life. It's best to start this course of prevention at the earliest age possible. Yes, it's safe and recommended for children, too.

The vaccine works to make sure that lumps are undetectable to any kind of breast exam because it works to keep the lump from being there in the first place. The vaccine is called Primary Disease Prevention.

You may know it better by its more common names: healthy diet, regular exercise, maintaining a healthy weight, and not smoking, adequate sleep, minimal alcohol consumption, and reduced stress.

Primary Disease Prevention is keeping people from getting cancer in the first place. Detecting breast cancer is a form of secondary prevention. It has its place in saving lives from breast cancer, but people would rather never have the disease than be survivors.

Like all vaccines, it's still possible to get the disease, but the odds are much lower. What would happen if we spent a whole month teaching people about the breast cancer vaccine? How much money would we save on treatment and drugs? How many more years of healthy life would people have? How much suffering could we avoid if we invested just a fraction of our time and money on prevention?