Survivor is fighting cancer through awareness
Leila Springer spearheads peer education project hoping to help black women and lift some stigmas
Leila Springer was 48 when she found a lump.
Six months later, the mother of three was diagnosed with Stage 3 breast cancer. Doctors gave her a 50-50 chance of survival.
“I was scared. I was shocked. I was one of those women that really believed that breast cancer was a white woman’s disease,” said Springer, who came to Canada from Barbados in 1971.
She stocked up on information about her condition, transforming her diet and health routines and undergoing surgery, chemotherapy and radiation in 1999. “I fought back like a tiger — and won.” Since then, Springer has battled to bring greater awareness of cancer screening to Toronto’s Caribbean-Canadian community, parts of which she says continue to suffer from a pernicious stigma shrouding discussions of disease.
“It’s surprising, but many women of African and Caribbean descent are not open to discussing health issues,” she said, particularly people who immigrated to Canada as adults.
Knowledge of family health history is also a problem. “Many don’t know if auntie had breast cancer, if mummy had breast cancer. They just know that they died.
“All the stigmas and taboos are still very much in place.”
Now, Springer has partnered with public-health researchers to create the city’s first peer education project.
The program targets black women to help boost breast and cervical cancer screening rates.
The program, based in Scarborough’s Malvern neighbourhood, trains people in the community to educate their peers on the importance of mammograms and Pap tests (despite recent controversy around the former).
“Early detection and screening saves lives,” said Onye Nnorom, who leads the Health Equity Research Collaborative (HERC), which designed the project. “This way, knowledge doesn’t just lie with the professional and the health-care providers.”
The program, called Ko-Pamoja — “learning together,” a hybrid title drawn from two West and East African languages — sought to crack what Springer calls “the code of silence” in a series of educational sessions at the TAIBU Community Health Centre from fall 2015 through to last January.
The vast majority of the 30 participants stated in a questionnaire they planned to carry out regular screening. By Jan. 1, four had already gone in for mammograms.
A Wellesley Institute study from February 2014 found that “belonging to an ethnic minority was among the most frequent barriers to screening.” That’s due in part to “cultural differences in attitudes, beliefs and emotions regarding breast cancer screening,” according to the report from the Toronto-based think tank.
The Canadian Cancer Registry does not collect information on race or ethnicity, but according to the U.S. National Cancer Institute, African American women are more likely to be diagnosed with cervical cancer than most other ethnic groups.
Black women also have a 40- to 60per-cent higher breast cancer death rate than white women, despite a comparable incidence rate, the American Cancer Society states. The disparity may be due in part to the relative lack of health insurance or access to care, according to the Susan G. Komen foundation.
Canadian research indicates immigrant women, including black women, are less likely to get their mammograms or Pap tests and often go to the doctor later on, when a cancer has progressed and is harder to treat.
Nnorom, an associate program director at the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health, is calling for more community-focused research and education for black women — and for a range of culturalspecific prevention programs — to improve cancer screening and outcomes.
“Depending on what country people come from, if there aren’t a lot of resources to treat cancer, they might view cancer as a death sentence. People don’t want to talk about it,” she said.
Springer, meanwhile, avoided a second cancer diagnosis last year when her annual mammogram spotted pre-cancerous cells, resulting in a mastectomy.
For her, the code of silence had been broken years before.
Springer hopes to launch Ko-Pamoja projects with HERC in other communities around Toronto in the coming months.
HERC is in the process of applying for funding and hospital grants to expand the program beyond Scarborough.
“Depending on what country people come from, if there aren’t a lot of resources to treat cancer, they might view cancer as a death sentence.” ONYE NNOROM OF THE HEALTH EQUITY RESEARCH COLLABORATIVE