Canberrans donate and raise millions of dollars for breast cancer, but do they have any influence on how the money is spent?
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An initiative from the National Breast Cancer Foundation is to ask breast cancer sufferers, their families, friends and the wider community what priorities in breast cancer research they would like to receive funding.
As part of a national community consultation taking in 13 locations across the country, the foundation will hold its Canberra forum on Monday to hear the views from a city which has the highest rate of breast cancer in the nation.
Chief executive Carole Renouf said that as the only body which funded breast cancer research using public money, the National Breast Cancer Foundation had a responsibility to respond to community concerns.
She conceded that as one of the highest-profile cancers, breast cancer had several different organisations and lobby groups vying for public and government attention: ''It's become a sea of pink.''
The three largest organisations were the Breast Cancer Network, which provided support and advocacy, the McGrath Foundation, which funded breast care nurses, and the National Breast Cancer Foundation, which raised money purely to fund research.
Ms Renouf said 50 per cent of research funded by the foundation went into the origins of the disease with an aim of eventual prevention. The other half went to applied research to address life-quality issues for sufferers as well as earlier diagnosis and chemotherapy advances.
Ms Renouf said one area which had received interest during the public consultation was the foundation's ''novel concept award'' which funded left-field research to provide seed funding for ''very radical and innovative ideas''. Projects funded under this round included a Queensland trial into spider toxins in new therapies, while an Adelaide project was looking at how women who have babies under the age of 25 build a protective response to breast cancer and how this can potentially be replicated in other women.
Ms Renouf said public consultation had already provided some themes on where people wanted research to focus.
''There is a strong emphasis on trying to stop deaths by unlocking the mystery of how cancer spreads from the breast to other organs, as typically this is what kills. There is a strong emphasis on understanding why there is a growing incidence of breast cancer in young women and how to stop it and there is a call for better health service delivery and clinical practice.''
Ms Renouf said it was surprising no widespread public consultation of this kind had been undertaken and there was federal government interest in the findings, which would be published early next year.
Ms Renouf noted that many more Australian women survive breast cancer. The latest figures show that over the period from 1994 to 2007, there had been an almost 30 per cent reduction in deaths from breast cancer.
The community forum will be held from 6pm at Rydges Lakeside Canberra on Monday. Bookings can be made on (02) 8098 4865.