Palestinian women excluded from breast cancer campaign

Deputy prime minister, minister of public health in the caretaker government, Gassan Hasbani, launched on Friday the National Breast Cancer Awareness Campaign 2018 organized by his ministry, but which excluded non Lebanese women. In this respect, a number of Palestinian women complained that they have been notified by the government run hospitals that the campaign does not cover them, and is restricted to Lebanese women. On the subject, the Palestinian Democratic Women’s Organization (Nada), announced that, along with all Palestinian women in Lebanon, it was shocked with this vetoing of Palestinian refugees, denouncing what it described as a racist, discriminatory measure, and stressing that it comes in the framework of a similar prejudiced policy adopted by the Lebanese State. For its part, Al Akhbar newspaper wrote today, that after excluding non-Lebanese women from the above campaign, individual initiatives emerged as a temporary and alternative solution to the predicament. To this end, Dr. Jamal Qura, disclosed that it is offering Palestinian women refugees free medical examination and cancer screening. She said that she started her direct contacts with Palestinian women without any intermediary, explaining that any woman refugee can visit her clinic and will be referred from there to one of the mammography centers. (Al Akhbar, October 18, 2018)