Online education portal starts a course in breast cancer awareness

As the month of October is marked as ‘breast cancer awareness month’ globally, an international health campaign which aims to raise awareness about the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of breast cancer, recently an online education portal started a course titled ‘Introduction to Breast Cancer’ to educate those interested to learn more on the illness. 

Breast cancer is one of the most common cancers affecting women: according to a study by Journal of Business Research, lack of awareness and delay in diagnosis are leading towards the breast cancer epidemic and may kill 76,000 Indian women in a year by 2020. It also revealed that the average age of death from the disease has shifted from 50 years to 30 years. According to the recent data given by Globacan 2017, breast cancer among Indian women is the highest worldwide. There is an increase in the trend of new cancer patients, and the age group of new patients has gradually dropped from <55 years to under 40 years of age. As per the data recorded in ICMR 2017, over 1.5 lakh new breast cancer patients were recorded in India last year.

The new course titled ‘Introduction to breast cancer’, is an introduction to breast cancer and covers topics like the- basic biology of the disease; risk factors and prevention and the treatment modalities. Those learning can also share the information on their social media. The course on the Coursera website is created by Yale University