The Fight Back Express bus will stop in Canton carrying the mobile message that Americans have the power to fight cancer in this country with their voices. The American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network is sponsoring the six-month bus tour to highlight the crucial role elected officials play in supporting laws and policies that help people fight cancer.
The bus will stop on Friday, May 9, at 10:15 a.m. at 4230 Belden Village Mall in Canton. The public is welcome to attend. The program will run from 11 a.m. to noon. Breast cancer survivor Kelly Zdelar is one of the speakers.
The ACS CAN Fight Back Express will kick off in Ohio on May 4, and will travel across the 48 continental United States through Election Day, Nov. 4.
"If one person can fight cancer, then a nation can rise up and defeat it," said Daniel E. Smith, president of ACS CAN, the sister advocacy organization of the American Cancer Society. "As an essential partner in the fight against cancer, government has a critical role to play in enacting laws and policies that help people battle a disease that will kill an estimated 565,650 people in America this year."
Scientific discovery alone will not defeat cancer. Lack of access to timely, quality health care impedes progress against this disease and is the greatest barrier to winning the war on cancer. Individuals and families who lack meaningful insurance often forgo routine screenings and when they become sick, they are forced to resort to less-costly and less-effective treatments. Through the bus tour, ACS CAN is working to make cancer a higher national priority by educating the public, lawmakers, candidates and the media about the importance of government's role in expanding access to care to those 47 million uninsured Americans.
Cancer patients, survivors, caregivers and their families are gathering in Canton to share their experience with the disease and voice the need to make dramatic changes in this country's approach to cancer.
"We can make this disease history," said Ten Gall of Canton, an American Cancer Society board member and ACS CAN volunteer. "We know what we need to do to win the war on cancer. Now we need our elected officials to join us and support laws and policies that will help fight a disease that kills too many people each year."
The ACS CAN Fight Back Express is a mobile action center. At each bus stop, visitors have the chance to share their story with their members of Congress through the Picture A Cure program, and sign a petition to support access to quality health care for all Americans.
The ACS CAN Fight Back Express bus tour comes on the heels of a major public-education campaign by ACS CAN and the American Cancer Society, raising awareness about the critical need for access to quality health care for all Americans.
There has been tremendous progress in the fight against cancer, indicated by the reduction in death rates from cancer every year since 1991. But continued success is a risk if Americans do not have access to cancer prevention, early detection and treatment. More than 1.2 million Ohioans are uninsured and countless more are underinsured, making them more likely to be diagnosed at later stages when cancers are more deadly.
Too often, lifesaving cancer prevention, early detection, and treatment programs are not available to patients who need care the most. As a result, these patients face much more difficult and far more expensive medical treatments, as well as a diminished quality of life -- unnecessary realities that could have been prevented had cancer-prevention, -detection and -treatment options been more easily available. Consequently, one in four families in the United States will use most or all of their life savings while trying to pay for their cancer-related costs.
ACS CAN supports evidence-based policy and legislative solutions for number of cancer-related issues including:
* Prevention and Early Detection: Regular screenings can catch cancer at its earliest, most treatable stages, but a federal program that offers low-income and uninsured women screenings for breast and cervical cancer only covers one in five eligible women. A similar program for colon cancer is now pending before Congress and needs to be created immediately. Both of these programs have the potential to save lives.
* Increased Funding for Cancer Research: Medical research could lead to the discovery of prevention and early-detection tools for the most deadly cancers, such as pancreatic and ovarian cancer, but federal research funding has been frozen or cut in recent years, threatening progress.
ACS CAN, the nonprofit, nonpartisan advocacy partner of the American Cancer Society, supports evidence-based policy and legislative solutions designed to eliminate cancer as a major health problem. ACS CAN works to encourage elected officials and candidates to make cancer a top national priority.
ACS CAN gives ordinary people extraordinary power to fight cancer with the training and tools they need to make their voices heard.
To find out more about the ACS CAN Fight Back Express and how to make cancer a national priority log onto www.acscan.org.