Latina Senator's bill would protect women

Health panel approves protections for women obtaining mammograms
PRESS RELEASE

SACRAMENTO – Women moved closer to accurate examinations today as the Senate Health Committee approved Senate Bill 148 by Sen. Jenny Oropeza. The measure seeks to increase public awareness of faulty mammogram machines.

“Women need accurate information to fight cancer and that’s what this bill seeks to achieve,” Oropeza, D-Long Beach, said after the measure passed on a bipartisan vote following a request by the chair of the committee, Elaine Alquist, to be a co-author of the consumer-protection measure. “This is a straightforward measure that will provide consumers context when receiving their test results.”

Mammogram machines are already tested annually, but those test results can go unseen by patients. Women deserve the right to know if the mammogram machines testing them are known to be faulty, Oropeza said.

Oropeza, a cancer survivor, cited several reasons to support SB 148:

· Breast cancer survival rates increase when diagnosed early. If the cancer is confined to the breast when discovered, the five-year survival rate is greater than 95 percent.

· About 1 in 8 women will develop breast cancer, according to the American Cancer Society. It is the second-most common cancer among women after skin cancers.

· Breast cancer is the second-leading cause of cancer deaths among women after lung cancer, according to the American Cancer Society.

· Breast cancer is the leading cause of cancer death in Latinas in the U.S., according to the Breast Cancer Fund.

Accurate machines can detect breast cancer in the early stages, when women have the best chances of beating the disease. SB 148 seeks to improve those results by ensuring women know if there is a reason to question their test results.

Today’s success doesn’t mean it will be easy to pass this SB 148. Oropeza authored an identical bill that died last year for non-policy reasons despite support from several health organizations, including the American Cancer Society and the Breast Cancer Fund.

SB 148 will next be heard by the Senate Appropriations Committee. No date has been set.