Breast cancer awareness – with a twist of lemon

Worldwide Breast Cancer, a global health charity focused on finding breast cancer better, uses Know Your Lemons, an innovative campaign and educational tool to teach a diverse population about breast cancer symptoms and detection. The campaign is used in 23 languages (Mandarin, Spanish, English, Arabic, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, German, Malaysian, French, Turkish, Italian, Gujarati, Polish, Myanmar, Romanian, Dutch, Greek, Kinyarwanda, Samoan, Norwegian, Hungarian and Serbo-Croatian) and more than 70 countries, and have been viewed by over 200 million people in 2017 alone.

Thanks to initiatives surrounding breast cancer awareness, the world is aware of the disease and dedicated to finding a cure. However, until a cure is found, education for early detection can help women find breast cancer in earlier stages. When found at the earliest stage, the survival rate can be very high. As per the American Cancer Society, the 5-year relative survival rate for women with stage 0 or stage I breast cancer is close to 100%. For women with stage II breast cancer, the 5-year relative survival rate is about 93%.

A recent survey of 19,000 women found:

• only two percent of the women surveyed know the signs of breast cancer, and

• 42 percent didn’t feel confident they would be able to spot a change indicative of breast cancer.

Know Your Lemons makes breast cancer education simple. Using a clever image of 12 lemons in an egg carton to represent the signs of breast cancer makes it easy for everyone, no matter their race or level of literacy to visualize what to look and feel for without needing to read. "These lemons are pretty powerful", says Corrine Beaumont, PhD., creator of Know Your Lemons and president of Worldwide Breast Cancer. "The campaign can be shown in public without being gory or getting censored, yet it’s incredibly detailed… It cuts through all the noise and simply explains what to look for, feel for and… the important steps to take to find it."

The bright and friendly tone of the campaign combined with the innocence of the lemon allows the image to be displayed publicly, without causing emotional discomfort. These principles allow the images to cross common healthcare communication barriers of literacy, taboo and fear, making it the only truly global breast cancer education campaign.

Combining her background in design and breast cancer expertise, Beaumont founded Worldwide Breast Cancer to change the way people view breast cancer, focusing on education for early detection and treatment. She says, "I knew I had to bravely take the leap to leave my job and pursue the charity full time to help educate as many as I could. And so I turned in my notice and formally started the charity, Worldwide Breast Cancer three years ago."

Source: Worldwide Breast Cancer (WBC)

08.02.2018

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