FDA Organizes Breast Cancer Screening For Staff

The Food and Drugs Authority (FDA) has organized a free screening and sensitization exercise for its female staff at its head office as part of measures to eradicate breast cancer.

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, marked in countries across the world, to help increase awareness and facilitate early screening, diagnosis, and treatment. Breast Cancer is the most common cancer in women worldwide.

Dr Annan Ayongo, a Family Physician Specialist of the Family Medical Department at the Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital in a presentation explained that early screening and diagnosis are the basis of breast cancer control.

According to her, if the cancer is detected early, with adequate treatment available, there is a good chance that breast cancer can be cured.

She further stated that, when breast cancer is detected at a later stage, curative treatment is mostly no longer an option. Treatment in such cases rather improves the quality of life of a patient and delays the disease progression, while supportive and palliative care should be readily available.

Staff of FDA were sensitized on the various types of breast examination such as the breast self-examination exercise, clinical breast examination and radiological breast examination.

According to the nurses, the self-breast examination should be a monthly exercise that helps ladies to identify changes in their breast and helps in early detection of any abnormalities.

She urged all women to do monthly breast examination from 5 to 7 days after their menstrual period and further stated that clinical breast examination is done between the ages of 20 to 40 yearly at any health facility.

The participants were advised to live healthy by consuming more fruits and vegetables, have more minutes of relaxation daily, maintaining not more than 30 Body Mass Index, practicing at least 150 minutes of exercise weekly and desisting from smoking.

The participants were finally taken through the clinical breast screening exercise.

In all, a total of about 200 staff were screened.