The campaign, international symbol of which is the pink ribbon, took place in the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine upon the initiative of the inter-faction union “Equal opportunities” today for the first time. As the participants stressed, such campaigns have been held in European parliaments in October regularly for the last 10 years.
The people’s deputies of Ukraine, both women and men – the participants of the event, decided to donate their one-day wages for buying a mobile mammograph and addressed mass media with a request to carry out wide educational programme to promote need for early diagnosis and prevention of cancer. “Our task is both to support such educational programmes on the state level and to carry out such programmes by ourselves,” stressed the Co-chairperson of the inter-faction union “Equal opportunities” Iryna Herashchenko.
“The State Budget should stipulate funding of prevention programmes and guarantee affordable breast cancer screening for women. Early, affordable and modern diagnosis is the main tool to decreasing disease rate,” mentioned the Co-chairperson of the inter-faction union “Equal Opportunities” Olena Kondratiuk.
The people’s deputies drew attention to the necessity to comprehensively address this problem by uniting efforts of women, society and the state. “Breast cancer is not only a medical, but also social, public and state problem. We should decrease women’s death and illness rates. Annually 17 thousands of women come to know that they have breast cancer. It is important to overcome women’s fear and hold outreach campaigns,” noted Olena Kondratiuk.
The inter-faction union “Equal Opportunities” decided to conduct such educational campaign on the second Friday of October in the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine.
The campaign was carried out with the support of the the Charity Fund “Women's Health and Family Planning” and the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation/SDC.