Washington – It’s the cancer with the yuck factor, that part of the anatomy lots of people would rather ignore.
And too many are ignoring it possibly to death: Nearly 42 million Americans older than 50 aren’t getting checks for colorectal cancer, the nation’s No. 2 cancer killer.
Now in five states, a government-funded project is beginning to offer free testing for the poor, part of a new push to better fight one of the few cancers that can be prevented, not just treated, if screening uncovers the earliest signs of trouble.
Money isn’t the only barrier. This is a cancer that can silently lurk in anyone, particularly during middle age and beyond. Black Americans are especially at risk.
Yet colorectal cancer doesn’t get the attention of breast and prostate cancers, which claim fewer lives.
“It’s a part of the body they don’t want anybody to mess with,” says Bruce Jenkins of the Missouri health department’s “Screening for Life” program, which this month began the free screening for low-income residents of St. Louis. “No matter how silly it sounds, it’s just reality that people think that way.”
Many at risk don’t know there are screening tests, and those who do “I think have the idea that it’s worse than it really is,” says Dr. Daniel Blumenthal of Atlanta’s Morehouse School of Medicine, who is researching how to improve screening rates among black men and women. “Even I was surprised when I had my colonoscopy. I had imagined something pretty awful, and it really wasn’t at all” – a message Blumenthal calls vital to spread.
About 148,600 Americans will be diagnosed with colorectal cancer this year, and more than 55,000 will die.
Up to 60 percent of those deaths could be prevented if everyone older than 50 underwent routine screening, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says. Yet just over half get tested.
Enter the CDC’s free-screening project, the first major federal effort to target people such as the low-income 50-year-old with no insurance.
Participants in Suffolk County, N.Y., and Baltimore will receive colonoscopies, where doctors use a long, flexible tube to visually inspect the colon. In three other sites – St. Louis; Seattle/King County, Wash.; and statewide in Nebraska – most participants will receive at- home fecal tests to detect hidden blood in the stool.
It’s not clear how well doctors urge colorectal screening, and those who need the message may not see a doctor regularly anyway.
“We have to make an impact somewhere outside of the doctor office,” stresses Morehouse’s Blumenthal, who is enlisting black ministers in his own CDC-funded research on ways to counter colorectal cancer’s racial disparity.
