“Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;”

By Dr. Kathleen T. Ruddy

As a new member of the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI), I look forward to actively participating in its annual meeting in New York City, September 22-26.  In fact, I will be hosting a special meeting facilitated by CGI at which Professor Vincent Tuohy of the Cleveland Clinic will discuss his work on the first preventive breast cancer vaccine.  I’d like to share with my readers here the personal statement I’ve posted to my CGI profile, which appears on CGI Connect, a website generated for the 1200+ members expected to arrive in Manhattan next week.  My personal statement represents my vision and my mission to CGI and the world.

My mother was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1974, the same year as Betty Ford. I was a secretary at the time but was thereafter drawn to a career in medicine, first as a physician assistant and then as a surgeon. In 1994, I was chosen as the first Fellow on the Breast Service at Memorial Sloan-Kettering, and in 1995 I was recruited by Cancer Treatment Centers of America to create a Breast Service for the Clara Maass Medical Center in Belleville, New Jersey. My practice grew exponentially; within six months I had 700 patients under my care.

In 2006, I enrolled in the first International Masters for Health Leadership (IMHL) at McGill University. My studies during the IMHL took me first to Kuwait, where I worked with a member of the royal family (Dr. Salman Al Sabah) to create a Breast Service for the Royal Hayat Hospital for Women in Kuwait city. I then received a grant from the WHO to begin a mammogram screening program for women in Uganda. It was during my travels that I first learned of the existence of a human breast cancer virus, and of a very strange, aggressive form of breast cancer ravaging young women in the Gulf and North African countries. I speculated then that if breast cancer was, indeed, related to a virus that the female soldiers deployed to this region during the Gulf Wars would come home with an increased risk of breast cancer.

Such is now the case.

I learned two years ago – and this is documented in peer-reviewed journals – that female veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have a 40% increased risk for breast cancer compared to non-military women or soldiers who’ve not served in this part of the world. To date, no funding has been given to further investigate the reasons why.

In 2008, after caring for more than 6000 patients on the Breast Service at Clara Maass, and after traveling the world with the International Masters for Health Leadership, I became convinced that far more attention needed to be given to understanding the causes of breast cancer and implementing all available knowledge to prevent the disease. To my dismay, I discovered that less than 2% of all the money spent on breast cancer research is devoted to primary prevention of this, the most common malignancy in every country in the world. This skewed allocation of resources, weighted so heavily in favor of diagnosis and treatment, didn’t make sense given that the incidence of breast cancer had doubled since President Nixon officially declared War On Cancer in 1971. And, certainly, early diagnosis via mammogram screening was of no service in Gulf countries where the preponderance of breast cancer occurs in women under 40! It seemed to me that the fevered focus on finding a cure was wholly inadequate to meeting the demands of an epidemic notable for its daunting head start and crushing momentum. Certainly, “finding it early” – cleverly marketed as ‘prevention’ when it is no such thing – is a failed strategy for eradicating this or any disease.

When I completed the IMHL in 2008 and returned to the United States to resume my duties in private practice, I felt pulled in two directions: I wanted to continue to care for women with breast cancer and maximize their chance of survival and good health (and spirits), and I wanted this disease to be over, gone, done, away – like polio is history. I decided then to create the first and only breast cancer foundation devoted exclusively to breast cancer prevention, the Breast Health and Healing Foundation (501c3). I’m glad I did, for I feel that every step that preceded this was designed to take me here.

I am particularly interested in the likely role of the mouse mammary tumor virus in causing a significant portion of human breast cancer (estimated to be involved in 40-75% of cases), and in developing a preventive breast cancer vaccine such as the one created by Professor Vincent Tuohy of the Cleveland Clinic in 2010.

My CGI Commitment to Action, embodies my mission to seek the “Pure Cure” for breast cancer – prevention. We’ve done it for cervical cancer by way of a vaccine. I believe we can do it for breast cancer too. In any case, I intend to try.

“Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;” (HENRY THE FIFTH, Act 3, scene 1. Shakespeare)