Cancer charity Susan G. Komen for the Cure announced a major shake-up on Wednesday, with CEO Nancy Brinker stepping down and President Liz Thompson leaving the organization in September. Brinker will move to a new role as the chairwoman of the board executive committee, the group announced. Two board members are also departing.
The announcement comes the same week as a new paper in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) takes aim at Komen for promoting early detection as the key to cancer survival. A recent ad campaign for the group features a smiling woman with the message, "Get screened now."
"Early detection saves lives," the ads state, adding that the five-year survival rate for breast cancer is 98 percent when it's caught early and only 23 percent when it's not. But Steven Woloshin of the Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center and Lisa M. Schwartz of the Center for Medicine and the Media at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice point out in their BMJ article that the ads "dramatically overstate the benefit of screening" and neglect to mention that screenings aren't always good for women.
The figure Komen's ad uses is bogus, the pair writes, ...
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