Ever since the mid-1980's, this month has been dedicated to Breast Cancer awareness, and you may have noticed that pink merchandise has spread across almost all businesses and platforms around the country, from popular yogurts to your favorite sports team. The Susan G. Komen foundation has been instrumental in branding and marketing in order to get women tested and treated for breast cancer, and has inserted itself in many lucrative markets, including its most advertised provider, the National Football League. For the last few seasons, athletes have been decked out in pink gloves, towels, and other accessories that have done a great deal in generating exposure for the foundation every October. However, once the month is finished, the NFL doesn't seem as enthusiastic for breast cancer awareness as they seem to be, as evidenced by the recent troubles of Pittsburgh Steelers running back D'Angelo Williams. Williams recently requested to continue wearing pink accessories on his jersey all season to honor his mother who died of breast cancer last year, but was reportedly denied.
Another major sports organization, Major League Baseball, had also partnered with the foundation, but reportedly only brought in $100,000 per year for an industry that makes 1.2 billion.
As for the foundation itself, Komen dedicates about a quarter of it's profits to cancer research, and about a third on education, an education that heavily emphasizes women getting regular mammograms. But even so, as research and testing has improved, scientists have been skeptical of the overall benefit of mammograms in the modern day, and although they are effective in detecting tumors, this New York Times article written by a survivor suggests that mammograms have done little to raise chances of survival, and often detect tumors that are unlikely to be lethal or spread past the breasts.
Finally, the Komen foundation has been involved with numerous court battles over trademarks involving the color pink and the use of the "cure" as a slogan versus smaller and less powerful cancer organizations.
It's 2015, and you'd be hard pressed to find an American man or woman who doesn't know what breast cancer is or how to feel for a lump. There were times when many women's health were swept under the rug and hushed. But for breast cancer, those days are long gone. Instead, we need to push for these large, rich charities like Susan G. Komen to spend more time and effort on research to actually find "the cure" that they so desperately brand on their merchandise, and to emphasize the charity more than the profit.
