Putting Prevention Back Into Prevention

I get a little tired of the slip-shod way vocabulary is used these days, particularly the word ‘prevention’.  Allow me to pull out my word bible, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, advertised as “America’s Best-Selling Dictionary”.  Let’s look up the word, prevention.

Prevention:  ”The act of preventing or hindering.”

O.K., then,  on to prevent:  ”To keep from happening or existing.”

Yesterday I received a brochure about an upcoming breast cancer conference to be held at a prestigious university in Washington, D.C. next year.  The conference Chairs are important professors in the field.  There are to be 30 distinguished breast cancer experts from all over the world who will address the conferees over a period of three days.  The tag lines advertised in this brochure for the conference are, “Treatment, Prevention, Reconstruction”.

Only two lectures are given to prevention, per se, and both of these focus solely on prophylactic mastectomy.  Yes, that will reduce the risk of breast cancer by approximately 90%, it’s true.  Is that all there is to say on the subject?  Apparently so, as least in Washington, D.C. next February.

Others, particularly the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation, have tried to re-tool the English language.   They use the word ‘prevention’ with stealth and skill to convince women that mammograms actually prevent breast cancer.  Oh dear, I guess those people didn’t go to college, or ever use a collegiate dictionary – or both.  Or, perhaps they understand the meaning of the word quite well, but it is their marketers who flaunt and deploy ‘prevention’ in the same sentence as breast cancer when what they are actually doing is essentially what Winston Churchill did when he made a martini:  put a good quantity of gin into a shaker with ice, and shake it while looking at a bottle of vermouth from across the room.

“No worries,” as they say in the Rockies.  For the first preventive breast cancer vaccine is set to begin clinical trials to see if it’s safe and effective for use in women (Tuohy, Nature Medicine, May 2010).  Once we know if Tuohy’s vaccine is safe and effective, the race will become archaic, and prevention can be retired from the babble that surrounds it now.