Dozens of Black women were screened for breast cancer in Scarborough on Saturday, at an awareness event hosted by the Scarborough Health Network, CBC Toronto reported. The event exists because the usual schedule for catching the disease was not built around them.
A Canadian study published in The Oncologist in 2024 linked census data with the Canadian Cancer Registry, in work led by Dr. Anna Wilkinson and Dr. Jean Seely of the University of Ottawa with Statistics Canada researchers. It found that more than half of breast cancers in Black women are diagnosed before age 50. For white women the figure is about 14%.
The disease also arrives in a harder form. Triple-negative breast cancer, an aggressive subtype with poorer survival, makes up 21% of Black women’s cases and 9.9% of white women’s, according to figures reported from the research. Black women are more likely to be diagnosed at stage II or higher.
The deaths follow. The researchers’ summary put it this way: “A Black woman in her 40s faces a breast cancer mortality rate that is 40% higher compared to White women of the same age group.” A later paper in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, reported by The Canadian Press, found the gap was as high as 70% for women of Caribbean origin in their 40s.
That is the problem with a one-size schedule. Ontario’s organized screening program now invites women from age 40, a change that reaches more of these patients. But routine screening every two years can miss a fast-growing tumour. Wilkinson has said that for triple-negative cancer, a two-year interval means you are “not always going to find it at an early stage.”
Events like Saturday’s go where a mailed invitation does not: a community setting, on-site mammograms, and a hospital that says plainly who the day is for. Scarborough Health Network runs breast health clinics at its Birchmount, Centenary and General hospitals, all designated sites in the Ontario Breast Screening Program, and has held similar days for Black communities before.
One Saturday does not fix a screening system. The researchers and the Canadian Breast Cancer Network have called for national guidelines that sort women into average, elevated and high-risk groups, with screening paths to match. Until Ottawa and the provinces write them, Black women’s best protection in Canada is a hospital willing to come to their neighbourhood. It should not depend on that.
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