Home health remedies ‘Godmother of Soul’ joins pharma-backed campaign to boost cancer screenings after pandemic...

‘Godmother of Soul’ joins pharma-backed campaign to boost cancer screenings after pandemic dropoff

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Grammy-award winning singer Patty LaBelle is taking to the kitchen to increase cancer screenings as part of a new effort sponsored by more than a dozen pharma companies.

The Godmother of Soul talks about the importance of time in cooking—time to add salt or time to take food off the burner—and relates it to the importance of routine testing in the public service video.

“Just like cooking, when it’s time, it’s time. Time to screen,” she says.

The idea for the Community Oncologist Alliance (COA) and Cancer Care campaign, sponsored by 13 pharma companies led by Bristol Myers Squibb and Roche’s Genentech, began during the pandemic. While oncologists knew visits to their offices were down, they were stunned by a study showing the depth of the drop-offs in screenings.

Breast cancer screenings dropped 85%, colon cancer 75% and prostate 74% at the height of the pandemic when compared to the year before, according to an Avalere Health study commissioned by COA.

RELATED: Roche’s Genentech joins push to encourage pandemic-time cancer screenings with American Cancer Society-partnered campaign

With a back-to-normal rebound still lagging last fall, the community practice oncologists decided they needed to take action. The group partnered with CancerCare to create the public health advocacy campaign. The goal? Drive more regular screenings for breast, colorectal, prostate, lung and skin cancers, especially in people over age 40.

“Time to Screen” soft-launched in April with a website and an around-the-clock hotline staffed by CancerCare-trained specialists who could answer questions about where people could get screened or what to do if they didn’t have insurance.

“You can’t just make up those drops in cancer screenings we saw last year overnight,” Nicolas Ferreyros, director of communications at COA, said. “There are some estimates that it could take up to five years to catch up just the backlog we’re seeing in this country—and that was before we started seeing the Delta variant outbreaks.”

RELATED: GSK reveals 26M Americans skipped routine vaccinations last year, quantifying widely held suspicions

LaBelle’s wisdom-from-the-kitchen campaign launched last week with video, radio and print PSAs, but she’s not spreading the word alone. Oncologists and cancer care nurses around the country are reaching out to local media and filming state-specific PSAs as part of the “Time to Screen” effort.

Ads with LaBelle will run through October, but COA plans to keep the campaign going through the rest of the year and even longer to keep rates on the rise.

Avalere will continue tracking back-to-screening progress on the group’s behalf, Ferreyros said. While screenings have been ticking upward, changes such as an increase in COVID-19 caseloads could stymie progress.

“I’m worried about the Delta variant right now because that could scare people away from going back to their doctors’ offices,” he said. “I’d be willing to bet there was an increase over the first four or five months of the year but maybe dropped back down more recently.”

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