March 8 is International Women’s Day (IWD). It is a global day celebrating the social, economic, cultural, and political achievements of women. The day also marks a call to action for accelerating women’s equality.
The theme of International Women’s Day 2022, is #BreakTheBias with several missions including but not limited to celebrating women’s achievements and forging positive visibility of women.
In line with the theme and missions of IWD 2022, ↓↑GivingTide celebrates all women who have contributed in no small way, to the improvement of healthcare globally and call on all women particularly in Nigeria to enhance their visibility by joining the effort to cause positive change in the health care of all Nigerians. Indeed, there is no better way of #BreakingTheBias and improving one’s visibility than being a force for good.
This is particularly important because Nigerians now have the 7th lowest life expectancy in the whole world. Most of these needless premature deaths are due to poor healthcare infrastructure particularly in the area of cancer care where the gap in Nigeria health infrastructure is most prominent.
Each individual that dies prematurely is a loved one of a woman – her husband, her son or daughter, her parent, and so on. Therefore, Nigerian women MUST play a pivotal role in reversing the current trend, by taking a cue from the exemplary efforts made by their fellow women in other parts of the world.
For instance, in 1884 when the very first Comprehensive Cancer Centre (CCC) was established in USA (the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center or MSKCC, New York), a woman (Mrs. Charlotte Astor) was the prime mover. Charlotte convinced her husband (John Astor) to provide the funds for the first phase of MSKCC, by drawing his attention to the plight of female cancer patients, who were then being rejected as hopeless cases by the Women’s Hospital, New York, where she was a board member.
Furthermore, the massive public awareness on cancer that was championed by the American Cancer Society (ACS), gained momentum through the effort of the “Women’s Field Army” (WFA). In 1936, Mrs. Marjorie Illig, a field rep of the American Cancer Society (a foremost USA charity), initiated a legion of women volunteers whose sole purpose of waging war on cancer. The WFA recruits donned khaki uniforms, complete with insignia of rank and achievement, and went out into the streets to raise funds and educate the public.
This resulted in an increase in the number of volunteers of ACS from 15,000 in 1935, prior to the initiation of the Women’s Field Army, to about 150,000 by the end of 1938. Moreover, this extraordinary movement by the American women contributed significantly to the improved cancer survivorship both in USA and globally.
The last shining example to inspire women as we mark the IWD is the founding of the world’s largest stand-alone children cancer hospital – Children’s Cancer Hospital Egypt (CCHE), in Cairo, Egypt.
The CCHE was spearheaded by a female paediatric oncologist, Dr Sherif Naga, after she lost 13 of the 16 paediatric cancer patients under her care, in one day. The CCHE was built solely by donation and is sustained entirely by donation. All children who present at the CCHE are treated FREE irrespective of their race, creed or class.
Nigeria definitely needs a “Women’s Field Army” to champion the BIG WAR Against Cancer. Our women have risen up to the challenge to #BreakTheBias before and can do it again but this time in the area of health care. In 1929, our celebrated heroic women were involved in an uprising (the Aba Women Riot) which is seen as the first major challenge to the colonialists authority in West Africa. They forced the British authorities to drop their plans to impose a tax on the market women, and to curb the power of the warrant chiefs.
↓↑GivingTide uses the opportunity of this year’s IWD to celebrate our women and once again call on everyone, collectively and individually, to commit to the effort towards improving the nation’s healthcare infrastructure.
Dr Abia Nzelu, Executive Secretary of GivingTide International, info@givingtide.org
Most people would be much smarter and better informed if they had awareness of what the “war on cancer” movement (and the “Breast Cancer Awareness” movement) does NOT raise awareness about.
The official mainstream “war on cancer” has been an unofficial “war” on the unsuspecting public: to keep them misinformed and misguided about the real truth of this “war.” The “moonshot” program is an extension or reincarnation of the enduring deep racket.
The orthodox cancer establishment has been saying a cure for cancer “is just around the corner” and “we’re winning the war on cancer” for decades. It’s all hype and lies (read Dr. Guy Faguet’s ‘War on cancer,” Dr. Sam Epstein’s work, or Clifton Leaf’s book, or Dr. Siefried’s work on this bogus ‘war’, etc). The criminal medical establishment deliberate and falsely self-servingly claims and distorts a ‘win’ in the bogus ‘war on cancer’ when the only notably win is a reduction in lung cancer due to a huge reduction in smoking, which has nothing to do with their cancer treatments. Lying is their mode of operation.
Since the war on cancer began orthodox medicine hasn’t progressed in their basic highly profitable therapies: it still uses primarily and almost exclusively highly toxic, deadly things like radiation, chemo, surgery, and drugs that have killed millions of people instead of the disease.
As long as the official “war on cancer” is a HUGE BUSINESS based on expensive TREATMENTS (INTERVENTIONS) of a disease instead of its PREVENTION, logically, they will never find a cure for cancer. The moonshot-war on cancer inventions, too, includes industry-profitable gene therapies of cancer treatment that are right in line with the erroneous working model of mechanistic reductionism of allopathic medicine.
The lucrative game of the medical business is to endlessly “look for” a cure but not “find” a cure. Practically all resources in the phony ‘war on cancer’ are poured into TREATMENT of cancer but almost none in the PREVENTION of the disease. It’s proof positive that big money and a total lack of ethics rule the official medical establishment.
It’s just like with any bogus official “war” (‘war on drugs’, ‘war on terrorism’, etc) — it’s not about winning these wars but to primarily prolong them because behind any of these fraudulent “war” rackets of the criminal establishment is a Big Business, such as the massive cancer industry. The very profitable TREATMENT focus of conventional medicine, instead of a PREVENTION focus which these official medical quacks (or rather crooks) can hardly make any money off, is a major reason why today 1 of 2 men and 1 in 3 women can expect a cancer diagnosis at some point in their lifetimes yet that rate was multiple times lower 5 decades ago when the phony ‘war on cancer’ began (1 in about 16). And 5 decades ago when this bogus war began cancer was the second leading cause of death and 50 years later it is STILL the second leading cause of death in the country this “war” was declared in. These facts alone prove we are NOT winning the war on cancer.
At the same time, this same orthodox cancer cartel has been suppressing and squashing a number of very effective and beneficial alternative cancer approaches. You probably guessed why: effective, safe, inexpensive cancer therapies are cutting into the astronomical profits of the medical mafia’s lucrative treatments. That longstanding decadent activity is part of the fraud of the war on cancer.
If the public were to scrutinize what the medical industry and its government pawns are telling them about the ‘war on cancer’ instead of blindly believing what they’re saying, they’d find that the cancer industry and the cancer charities have been dismissing, ignoring, and obfuscating the true causes of cancer while mostly putting the blame for cancer on the individual, denying or dismissing the serious harms from orthodox cancer treatments and chemical toxicants, and resorting to deceptive cancer statistics to “educate” (think: mislead) the public that their way of treatment is actually successful (read this well referenced scholarly article’s afterword on the war on cancer: do a search engine query for “A Mammogram Letter The British Medical Journal Censored” by Rolf Hefti, a published author of the Orthomolecular Medicine News organization, and scroll down to the afterword that addresses the fraudulent ‘war on cancer’).
What the medical establishment “informs” the public about is about as truthful as what the political establishment keeps telling them. Not to forget, the corporate media (the mainstream fake news media) is a willing tool to spread these distortions, lies, and the scam of the war on cancer.
Does anyone really think it’s a coincidence that double Nobel laureate Linus Pauling called the ‘war on cancer’ a fraud? If you look closer you’ll come to the same conclusion. But…politics and self-serving interests of the conventional medical cartel, and their allied corporate media, keep the real truth far away from the public at large. Or people’s own denial or indifference of the real truth.