Death by stigma: the cancer myths that kill Asians
- It isn’t contagious, a trial from God, caused by a jinx or immoral behaviour, yet beliefs such as these prevent many Asian sufferers from getting the early treatment that could save their lives
Dr Cannas Kwok was just 14 when her mother died from breast cancer in 1983 in Hong Kong, after years of being shuttled in and out of hospital. Kwok, now 50 and living in Sydney, recalls how her mother could not “eat, sleep or breathe” in her last days.
“But it was kept as a private matter and only talked about within the family,” said the senior lecturer and deputy director of research at University of Western Sydney’s School of Nursing and Midwifery.
When Kwok moved to Sydney in 1993, she noticed Australia put a lot of effort into promoting breast cancer screenings through posters, television ads and later even on social media. But Asian women were still not really taking part. “This is how I started my PhD studies on the role of culture in breast cancer screening behaviours,” said Kwok.
Kwok’s research on Asian immigrants to Australia, published this year in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health , is among the latest to show how these women have a much higher chance of developing breast cancer than their peers in their home countries. And when they are diagnosed, they are more likely than the general population to be at a later stage of the illness.
This trend has been found among Asian immigrants in the United States. The Cancer Prevention Institute of California found that incidence rates of breast cancer – the most common form of the disease, affecting 2.1 million women globally each year – in all Asian-American ethnic groups increased between 1988 and 2013.
In Canada, a study by Women’s College Hospital and the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Services (ICES) found Asian minority groups were less likely to be screened for breast cancer compared to the general population. Researchers put this down to language barriers, cultural stigmas and limited support networks, problems also faced by Asian immigrants, both male and female, suffering from other cancers and life-threatening illnesses.