Latin Women Face Soaring Rates of Breast and Cervical Cancers

Written by Lucy Soto Sunday, February 07 2010

The U.S. Hispanic population is expected to triple in the next 40 years, and by 2050, one in four women in the United States will be a Latina. That means the health challenges facing this community – soaring rates of breast and cervical cancers – will be multiplying in the years ahead, too.

That burden is one community advocates, doctors, and counselors already are shouldering – and trying to lighten. It’s happening in places like Texas, where Venus Ginés is working overtime to train promotoras de salud - health counselors - to educate Latinas about health screenings; and in South Carolina and Georgia, where Dr. Lisa Flowers’s nonprofit is partnering with the American Cancer Society to spread the word about mammograms, Pap smears, and vaccines for HPV, the sexually transmitted virus that causes cervical cancer.

For Ginés, the passion to get women screened early and treated is deeply personal. Her sister died of cervical cancer. “That was a heartbreak for me,” she says. “I wish I had the knowledge – what I know now, then.”

Her group, Dia de la Mujer Latina [DML] is dedicated to educating about and eliminating health disparities in access to breast and cervical cancer screening, as well as providing information about diabetes and autism. DML was based in Georgia until a few years ago, when it moved to Texas – one of three states in the nation that certifies community health counselors.

Ginés has trained 172 of these promotoras in 34 cities across the country, including Georgia, Florida, New York, and also Puerto Rico. These bilingual and bicultural counselors often have diabetes or are cancer survivors themselves. And many were health professionals in their native countries.

“We’re trying to not only educate, but you have to navigate people to where they can be screened, free or low cost, and to explain the results,” Ginés says. “Often “people just get the lab report, but that needs to be explained.”

Generally, it is difficult to make assumptions about Latinas. The community is an array of races and nationalities from nearly two dozen countries. Each group has unique aspects of culture, history, and even language that play into the total health care picture.

So, the community may be varied, but what it has in common, advocates agree, is the need for more education, information, and access to screenings to address the current and growing needs.

Here are a few disturbing statistics:

• Breast cancer ranks highest among all cancers affecting Latinas in the United States, and the five-year survivorship rate for Latinas is lower than that for non-Latina whites.
• Cervical cancer rates are up to three times higher than those for non-Latina whites.
• Latinas are 1.5 times more likely to die from cervical cancer as compared with non-Hispanic white women.

Latinas are waiting too long to get the care they need, says Dr. Flavia Mercado, medical director for the Hispanic Health Coalition of Georgia. The HHCG is a nonprofit targeting Hispanic health and social awareness.

Often, affordability is the reason, as well as, Mercado explains, “culturally, Hispanic women are taking care of others and forget to take care of themselves.”

Last year, the HHCG brought together about 100 people from nonprofits, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, physicians, and legislators to talk about Hispanic health in Georgia. The group is hoping to receive a second grant to host another meeting to discuss progress from the last year and the plan ahead.

Along with cancer, Mercado says she sees high rates of diabetes, hypertension, and obesity, as well as growing rates of HIV.

“They are bringing in their children to get help, but they wait sometimes [for themselves],” says Mercado, who sees Hispanic families, mostly of Mexican background, at the International Medical Center, a kind of one-stop shop for health care, operated by Atlanta’s Grady Health System.

“They are taking care of their families, but often put themselves second. Hispanic women have different disparities in health care, and it’s usually because they are coming later in the course [of care],” she says. “If they came earlier and got screened, they might not have as many problems and morbidity.”

Ginés says fear plays a large role. “A lot of our immigrant women fall through the cracks because they don’t have the money to go to a clinic or are fearful, if they are undocumented, about going to a clinic.”

In fact, she believes, mistrust is a primary reason keeping Latinas from getting the care they need. Her group conducted a study of 376 people in Puerto Rico, Atlanta, Miami, and Houston that showed 87 percent of Latinas say mistrust kept them from getting vaccines for things like HPV, the human papillomavirus, from going to screenings and from clinical trials.

Flowers is president of Spirit Foundation Inc., a nonprofit dedicated to educating women of diverse backgrounds about preventable diseases and cancers. The group has launched Con Amor Aprendemos - With Love We Learn - to train community health counselors who will educate Latinas and their partners.

Flowers, who also practices at the International Medical Center, says her biggest challenge in cervical cancer education is getting women to understand why they might have HPV or be at risk for it.

“Often they say their only partner is their husband and they [or their partner] don’t understand why they have the infection,” she says. “But the sexual history of their partner put them at risk for the disease.”

The waiting and the worry are troublesome, Flowers says, because, in the case of cervical cancer, woman can survive if it’s caught early. It has a 95-percent survival rate if caught in the first stage and is almost 100-percent curable in the pre-cancerous state.

“Early detection of the disease is so critical,” she says. “We want to emphasize for women not to be afraid. That’s it’s better to find out and deal with it.”

Here’s a list of several helpful websites with information on health statistics and Latina health issues and resources.

National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health
National Latina Health Network
Spirit Foundation Inc.
Hispanic Health Coalition of Georgia

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Lucy Soto worked as a reporter for the Atlanta Journal Constitution for nearly a decade. Before that she worked for the Associated Press. Born in Medellin, Colombia, she grew up in Greenville, S.C., and now chases after her four children in Atlanta.