US First Lady Laura Bush, accompanying President George W. Bush in his second visit to the Kingdom, toured King Fahd Medical City on Friday in Riyadh. It was her second visit to the medical city as part of a Saudi-US partnership to raise breast cancer awareness in the Kingdom. She said that joint efforts in research and awareness programs of the disease have taken long strides.She held talks with Dr. Abdullah Al-Amro, executive director of King Fahd Medical City and chairman of Saudi Association for Fighting Cancer, in which they discussed the Saudi-US partnership to lower breast cancer risks. Mrs. Bush pinned hope on the partnership to help raise public awareness of the disease to break long-held taboos about the disease. She then met with specialists of early breast cancer detection. With first-hand accounts, Mrs. Bush then listened to two survivors, Umm Muhammad and Umm Nawaf, as they told their experiences with the deadly disease. While touring the medical city, she visited four hospitalized women with breast cancer, encouraging them to fight the disease. “We have found only 18 cases of breast cancer of 1200 women screened,” said consultant Huda Abdulkarim, head of the trauma department at the medical city. The Kingdom is one of the countries least hit by breast cancer, she said.Unfortunately, most cases in the Kingdom are not reported until late stages of the disease, she added, urging early screening. There has been cooperation with the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center to work simultaneously on research project in both countries, she said. “Breast cancer does not respect national boundaries, which is why people from every country must share their knowledge, resources and experience to protect women from this disease,” Bush said in a speech at the medical city during her first visit last year. – Okaz __
