Raising awareness and educating women about this disease are also highly advisable. Women should have a support group once they are diagnosed so that they can combat this disease and win the fight against it***

I just came back from attending a funeral service. My friend of last ten years, Dorothy, lost her fight with breast cancer. Her funeral was held at a Baptist church in Southeast Washington, DC. of the Anacostia district, which is known as America's hidden shame. She was an African American woman, a single mother of a thirty-six year old handicapped daughter.

Dorothy had a lot of friends and was well liked by many people. At her funeral there were a lot of people in attendance. During the service some of her friends talked about her generosity, her spirit and her willingness to help others.

Dorothy was a breast cancer survivor for thirty-four years. She had a radical mastectomy (removal of the entire breast) done and remained cancer free since then. She needed to take Novadex, a drug to reduce the chances of a reoccurrence. For the last ten years she had no health care coverage and had no access to advanced mammogram. She just put her faith in God and prayed that her cancer would not come back.

She was not spared, the cancer did come back in her other breast after many years, and she had no clue. By the time she could afford to go to a doctor after her friends helped her, the diagnosis was grim. Her cancer was in stage four. Her church stepped in when she could not take care of herself. She took her last breath in a hospice a few days ago.

Breast cancer is claiming the lives of women all over the world. It is the number one killer of women in developing countries. In a country like Bangladesh, it is estimated that breast cancer is the second most common cancer among women. In our society, women's health issues are not given priority. In most developing countries there is a stigma surrounding breast cancer that makes it difficult to be diagnosed.

Breast cancer is neither "contagious" nor "infectious." In Bangladesh many women die each year without any treatment. If detected early breast cancer in most cases is a preventable disease; it changes the patient's prognosis significantly. Months of oversight results in the spreading of the disease to all the other major organs, and at that time even the most aggressive treatment does not work. The stigma is a barrier that eventually leads to a very ghastly diagnosis and, in turn, death.

First and foremost, we need to remove the stigma that is attached to

breast cancer. The Bangla word for breast is stan, and to this day it is still a taboo word and is not a part of our daily vocabulary. Society's ignorance about treatment of breast cancer makes it an untreatable disease. Womens' shyness in refusing to talk about such a subject makes it virtually impossible for others to know that they need treatment. In a lot of cases women simply do not open up to anyone even if they feel something is out of the ordinary.

There may not be any treatment available even if a woman decides to ignore social taboo. No yearly checkups are available to the masses, nor is there any practice of monthly selfexamination by checking for lumps or tumours. Some Dhaka city hospitals have cancer treatment facility. Only the privileged people can afford the treatment. There is no help for the poor rural women. The cancer institute and the research hospital centre are unable to meet the very high demand.

Only some private care clinics have a mammography machine, which detects cancer from a screening. The cost of a routine examination is very high. After the detection of a malignant tumour in a breast, a woman's survival rate increases only if she can get a mastectomy done.

A real lumpectomy is less costly, depending on the stage of the cancer. There is more after that. The follow-up

care with radiation therapy or chemotherapy is a must, which is time consuming and the cost is exorbitant.

Unless our Bangaldeshi pharmaceutical companies make affordable cancer drugs and the health ministry sees to that each woman with breast cancer gets treatment, the number of deaths will increase at an alarming rate.

According to a 2008 report, 22,000 women in Bangladesh are attacked by breast cancer every year and 70 percent die from lack of treatment. The health care people must educate all women about the importance of monthly selfexamination. Society should change its outlook and should see the disease as just any other fatal disease unless it is treated.

To reduce the risk of breast cancer, an open-minded society where women's health issues are not ignored is needed to tackle this disease. Putting women at ease when they want to talk about this disease is another way that we should adopt in order to keep this dreadful disease under control. A woman should not be stigmatized or made to think that it is the end of her life when she has breast cancer.

Recently, when nurses in rural Mexico were training women how to examine their breasts for cancer they objected and didn't want to learn. They said: "Our men would leave us." Raising awareness and educating women about this disease are also highly advisable. Women should have a support group once they are diagnosed so that they can combat this disease and win the fight against it.

Zeenat Khan is a fiction writer based in the United States. She wrote this piece in memory of her friend Dorothy.