PERSPECTIVE ON BREAST CANCER : It's Not Just a Tragic Part of Life : A disease that afflicts so many women is a social concern entitled to the full force of national activism.

By RUTH ROSEN

Sept. 28, 1990 12 AM PT

<i> Ruth Rosen, a professor of history at UC Davis, is the author of "The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America" and is working on a history of contemporary American feminism. </i>

When does a disease become a political issue? When it is contagious, incurable and kills those who are still vigorous enough to mount a campaign to grab public interest and funding. Every year 140,000 women are diagnosed with breast disease; every year 42,000 women die of it. I am not the only person who, while watching one more television program on AIDS, has noted that every two years more women die from breast cancer than all the people in the United States who have ever died from AIDS. Yet, because breast cancer is not a contagious or predictably incurable disease, and because women have not yet defined it as a “women’s issue,” what should be seen as a major social and political problem is regarded as a tragic and somehow biologically fated part of women’s lot.

This is not to suggest that AIDS should receive any less attention or funding. On the contrary, women have a great deal to learn from groups that have successfully publicized and politicized the horror of the AIDS epidemic.

But it is time for national women’s organizations to comprehend that a disease that afflicts so many women is more than a medical problem--it is a social concern entitled to the full force of national activism. What, for example, has caused the incidence of breast cancer to rise from one out of 11 women to one out of 10? Is it the result of better detection, longer life spans or have environmental pollution, oral contraceptives and dietary habits somehow caused a greater proliferation of the disease? Why do so many doctors and insurance companies fail to encourage or cover preventive mammograms?

Because women are at particular risk, breast cancer is a women’s issue waiting to be recognized as such. This doesn’t mean that other problems, including abortion rights, are any less important. But a single-issue orientation has obscured the reality that breast cancer kills women with terrifying frequency.

In Boston and Oakland, women who have survived cancer have started organizations (the Cambridge Women’s Community Cancer Project and the Oakland’s Women’s Cancer Resource Center) to lobby for better preventive care, increased research funding and improved insurance coverage and to provide information and support groups for breast cancer patients. Other women, however, should not leave this battle to those who are exhausted from treatment or in the process of dying.

The National Women’s Health Network, a national organization that promotes and monitors women’s health-care delivery in the United States, has testified at congressional hearings that the government must reconsider its current priority of funding research for treatment while ignoring research for prevention. They are lobbying for the resumption of a canceled study on the association between dietary fat and breast cancer and for a new study to explore the connections between breast cancer and oral contraceptives.

There are many obstacles to overcome, including those in medical training. Only 2% of medical students take elective courses in preventive medicine; the academic award system rewards those who engage in basic research and technology development rather than those who devote themselves to prevention.

Attention to women’s health care, moreover, is sadly neglected. In 1987 the National Institutes of Health spent less than 14% of its $7.6-billion research budget on women’s health issues, although women make up more than half the population. The General Accounting Office has reported that National Institutes of Health has made little progress in including women in research study populations, and, as a result, women’s problems are not taken seriously until they reach a critical stage.

Look around you. One-tenth of your sisters, daughters, wives, lovers, mothers and female friends (who manage to survive other life-threatening accidents or diseases) will, in the course of their lives, receive a diagnosis of breast cancer.

It’s time for feminists, the public and politicians to grasp that breast cancer is a disease of epidemic proportions that affects enormous numbers of women and, hence, hundreds of thousands of their children, partners and friends.

This is a silent political constituency waiting to be discovered. There is no greater human right than the right to live out one’s natural life span.