State targets breast cancer

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promises to fund more breast

cancer prevention and treatment.

Few state lawmakers have not been touched in some way by the physical and mental ravages of cancer. A growing number of lawmakers from across the state — and political spectrum — are pledging a more aggressive fight against breast cancer when the Legislature returns to Columbia in January.

Up until now, the Legislature has been noticeably weak on funding cancer research, treatment and early detection efforts. A recent Greenville News series found that hundreds of South Carolina women are dying each year from breast and cervical cancer, but lawmakers have spent none of the $1 billion tobacco settlement money directly on the disease.

A new commitment by lawmakers to fight cancer is to be welcomed, and it comes with sharply differing views on the best way to fund initiatives. The most viable idea, supported by several lawmakers and the Greenville Hospital System, would be to raise the cigarette tax. Some new revenue could be used to buy mammography machines, pay for screening tests and fund research.

Gov. Mark Sanford, for his part, suggested that his restructuring plans for health agencies could yield efficiencies that would provide more money for the prevention and treatment of breast cancer. Freeing up more money through efficiency is preferable to raising the tobacco tax, but it's not certain that restructuring will provide millions of dollars for the fight against cancer. If Sanford is unable to find sufficient funding, he should not shrink from leading the charge to raise the cigarette tax.

Senate President Pro Tempore Glenn McConnell, whose two sisters have been struck by breast cancer, said some of the tobacco settlement money should be redirected to breast cancer programs. Rep. Gilda Cobb-Hunter, an Orangeburg Democrat whose niece was diagnosed early this year with breast cancer, said she would renew her legislation to create a breast cancer license tag.

More than 600 women are expected to die this year of breast cancer in South Carolina. As the News series pointed out, the mortality rate of black women in South Carolina due to breast cancer has been growing steadily over the past decade, even as those rates have been declining across the country. In the Upstate, black women are dying of breast cancer at a much higher rate than blacks statewide and throughout the country.

All of the ideas state leaders are proposing — raising the cigarette tax, redirecting tobacco settlement money, creating a special license tag and restructuring government — hold promise for fighting cancer. Raising the tobacco tax, however, remains the most solid idea offered thus far.

Sanford and lawmakers have made a commitment to fight cancer. They should be held to those promises so that South Carolina might be able to join the rest of the nation in reducing the mortality rates of women from breast cancer.