Campaigners demand extension to cancer screening

Thousands of people in the West of Ireland signed a petition today demanding a breast cancer screening service be rolled out country wide.

Breeda Moynihan-Cronin, the Labour Party’s South Kerry TD, said the BreastCheck programme had been promised for the West and South since 2002.

She warned lives were being lost in the delays.

The programme, which invites women aged between 50 and 64 – the group most susceptible to breast cancer – to a clinic for a free mammogram has been piloted in the east, the north-east and the midlands.

Ms Moynihan-Cronin said: “It is an apartheid system, I don’t see why I should be treated differently just because I live in Kerry.”

Thousands of people signed the petition – which has over 10,000 signatures on it – in counties including Kerry, Tipperary, Cork and Limerick to call for the service to be delivered everywhere as quickly as possible.

She said: “Lives are being lost at the moment, as in the East women between the ages of 50 and 65 are offered screenings. That catches a lot of people.”

The TD said that without the programme a lot of women along the west coast would not think of going for screening or be able to afford it.

The ’BreastCheck for Kerry Now’ campaign will hand the petition to the Government in the coming weeks.

The Health Department has recently said the BreastCheck programme will be extended to the West in 2007 – it was originally promised to be rolled out nationwide in 2002.