The Gift Of Hope

A Hong Kong charity is in the vanguard of the fight against breast cancer. Its gala dinner this month aims to raise funds for a new centre, as NICK GOODYER discovers.

- Nick Goodyer

THE HONG KONG Breast Cancer Foundation (HKBCF) was inaugurated on International Women’s Day – March 8, 2005. Since then, in its 12 years of operation, it has benefitted the lives of thousands of women in Hong Kong, be it through screening, counselling or other forms of support.

The need for such an organisation is borne out by the figures. Breast cancer is the numberone cancer affecting women in Hong Kong, and is third in terms of cancer-caused mortality among women in the territory. The stats make for grim reading – each day, 10 local women are diagnosed with the illness and one dies from it.

Yet despite the need, when the HKBCF was formed by surgical oncologist Dr Polly Cheung, the government was doing very little about the situation, certainly not in terms of education or early screening for the disease.

“When we formed the organisation, there was a feeling that there was an ‘oriental’ approach, in that there was the lack of mammography you see in the West – the early-detection mode there,” says Cheung over a coffee in the Chairman Suite in The Conrad Hong Kong. “The government said there was no local evidence to support mammography screening, but we felt that local data was very important to tell us if breast cancer is the same for oriental women and whether treatment and screening should be different [from the West]. That led us to form the Hong Kong Breast Cancer Registry, to look at all the diagnoses across the territory, from all centres. Currently we have 18,000 patients on it.”