Outreach program helps immigrants fight disease.

2003 AUG 7 - (NewsRx.com & NewsRx.net) -- On a warm spring morning, a dozen women sit nervously on a bench outside a trailer parked at the Chandler Family Health Center in Phoenix, Arizona, waiting to have mammograms. None of them speaks English.

Gabriela Parodis helps them over that hurdle. She's a petite woman of 24, with a light-brown ponytail and big glasses. And though she just graduated from Arizona State University in December 2002, she's the driving force behind the Migrant Health Education Program, a student initiative that provides free breast cancer screenings for women without health insurance. Backed by grants from the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation, Parodis' program provides such screening events all over Arizona.

Most of the women who attend are Hispanic; though no one asks, most are assumed to be undocumented. Parodis is a native of Argentina, and the majority of the students she recruits are also Hispanics planning to go to medical school. They help the patients fill out forms, teach them to do breast self-examinations, and later will follow up with the mammography results.

Breast cancer is a leading killer of Hispanic women, but for cultural reasons, and often because they don't have health insurance, they may put off being screened for the disease. And even if they are diagnosed with breast cancer, many don't have the money to pay for treatment. Parodis' program intends to break that cycle.

"Early detection and prevention save lives," Parodis says, "but they're also more cost effective for the healthcare system. It's more cost effective to remove a lump before it becomes a problem than to treat a person who has a cancer that has metastasized. It benefits the entire healthcare system to support prevention."

There are no hard figures as to the incidence of breast cancer among Hispanic women in Arizona because it's a population under the radar, understudied, underreported, underrepresented, and underserved. And some of the women in that population are undocumented immigrants. But it costs approximately $30,000 to treat breast cancer, including surgery, according to Mazin Al-kasspooles, a surgical oncologist at Maricopa Medical Center.

Al-kasspooles, 36, volunteers his time and his expertise to MHEP, collecting the radiology reports and following up with the women in his breast clinic at the medical center. He is also trying to raise money to pay for the cancer cases that Parodis' program turns up.