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**Health equity in cancer is when everyone has an equal opportunity to prevent
cancer, find it early, and get proper treatment.**
Two of those three depend on things people can do for themselves. **Risk can
be lowered** by avoiding tobacco, keeping a healthy weight and protecting skin
from the sun. Screening tests can find some cancers early, when treatment
works best.
The gap
Many people do not get the screening tests they need — and the reasons
named are not ignorance or reluctance:
- A low income
- No health insurance
- Trouble getting to a doctor
Those are logistical and financial barriers, and they do not respond to being
told that screening matters. Someone who cannot take unpaid time off, or
cannot afford the test, or cannot reach the clinic, already knows.
What follows from that
The CDC works with partners on two things at once: **educating people about
cancer**, and **increasing screening among groups more likely to get or die
from cancer**.
The second half is where the barriers above get addressed — which is why
equity work in cancer looks less like a campaign and more like removing
obstacles: covering the cost, bringing screening closer, and reaching the
people whose absence from the statistics is itself the finding.
A cancer found late in someone who was never offered a test is not a screening
failure on their part. It is the outcome this work exists to change.
Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Licence: CC0 1.0 (public domain) · Adapted from www.cdc.gov
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