HUMANE CHARITY SPOTLIGHT

Love/Avon Army of Women

If you are looking for a way to support the fight against breast cancer, Love/Avon Army of Women, a partnership between the Dr. Susan Love Research Foundation and the Avon Foundation, is an excellent choice. Rather than using animal experimentation, the aim of this new initiative is to recruit one million women to directly participate in research that could eliminate breast cancer.

Their revolutionary initiative has two key goals:

• To recruit one million healthy women of every age and ethnicity, including breast cancer survivors and women at high-risk for the disease, to partner with breast cancer researchers and directly participate in the research that will eradicate breast cancer once and for all.

• To challenge the scientific community to expand its current focus to include breast cancer prevention research conducted on healthy women.

Your support of  Love/Avon Army of Women will help patients, provide health education, prevent illness, and conduct vital research—all without the use of animals.

• How will research change now that the Army of Women exists? Breast cancer research is often focused on killing the tumor cells. Much less attention is paid to how cancer starts and how to prevent it. Furthermore, most prevention research has been conducted in the lab — on cell lines and mice. The Army of Women will focus new attention on the need to unlock the key to what causes breast cancer by having women partner with scientists.

• Why do researchers want to study healthy women? Most basic research in breast cancer has been done in the laboratory and on animals, or with samples collected and stored from women with breast cancer. Researchers use animals and samples from a “tissue bank” because they don’t have ready access to healthy women. But what we learn from animals doesn’t always translate into how cancer develops in women, and tissue only from women with cancer may not help solve the puzzle of what caused the cancer. The Army of Women will allow researchers to conduct a wider array of studies and to solve the puzzle as to how breast cancer starts and how to stop it in women!

For more information, please visit www.ArmyOfWomen.org.

Each month the Council on Humane Giving profiles a health charity that displays the Humane Charity Seal of Approval on its Web site or literature. Please consider showing your support by writing a letter of thanks or giving a donation, and be sure to tell your friends, family and coworkers about this outstanding health charity.

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