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Bold initiative at cancer screening

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Khairy speaks during the MoU signing ceremony.

By Natasha Jee and Alexandra Lorna

KUCHING: The Ministry of Health Malaysia (MoH) in collaboration with Novartis Malaysia introduced the B’RANI initiative as a measure to ensure that more people not only have access to breast cancer screening but are also encouraged to get screened.

Health Minister Khairy Jamaluddin said detecting and treating breast cancer early has shown to increase chances of survival tremendously.

“In Malaysia, the fear of diagnosis, cost of diagnosis and fear of losing the breast continues to negatively impact the uptake of screening programmes.

“In order to overcome the stigma, MOH is taking the initiative to introduce B’RANI,” he said.

He was speaking during the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signing ceremony between Sarawak General Hospital (SGH), Novartis Malaysia, and Clinical Research Malaysia (CRM) at Clinical Research Centre (CRC) Auditorium in SGH on Monday (Sept 5).

“The initiative hopes to engage community leaders to promote breast cancer screening within their communities and incentivise them upon each successful referral.

“Expanding beyond breast cancer screening, I am happy to note that Novartis will be partnering not only with MOH under the PeKa B40 programme but also with non-governmental organisations (NGOs) such as Womengirls and MyKasih to advocate for non-communicable diseases (NCD) screenings,” he said.

Khairy said the pilot projects will be conducted in Klang Valley PPRs and he hopes that the scope can be extended to other areas.

Present were Deputy Premier Datuk Seri Prof Dr Sim Kui Hian, Sarawak Health Department director Dr Ooi Choo Huck, SGH director Dr Ngien Hie Ung, Novartis Malaysia Elwakil Mohamed, and CRM chief executive officer Dr Akhmal Yusof.

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