By Lauren Taylor

Pink is nice, but how about baby blue?

If the NFL wants to leverage the resources of Monday Night Football (and Sunday day and night football, too) on a public health issue — and do it in a gender-coded manner — how about a prostate cancer campaign?

Why not speckle the player’s arms, coaches hats and referees shirts with a bit of baby blue? Prostate is the number one cancer among U.S. men (breast cancer is #2 among women – behind lung) and messaging about prostate cancer screenings could reach more than 8 million men.

Or, could the NFL draw attention to testicular cancer, known to strike young men aged 20-34? Sounds like prime viewership of NFL football to me.

Sadly, the men watching this testosterone-charged sport hear strikingly little about prostate or testicular cancer when compared with the flood of breast cancer awareness messages women receive.

Absolutely: Breast cancer awareness is an incredibly important cause, but it is already heavily lobbied by a variety of non-governmental organizations and businesses. (Last year, the National Cancer Institute spent more than $572 million on breast cancer research, nearly twice as much as on prostate cancer. Even though they have about he same number of new cases each year, the mortality rates for prostate cancer are slightly higher overall — and significantly higher among African American men, according to a 2008 American Cancer Society report – see p. 44).

Breast cancer is an almost entirely female disease, and the messaging that was most clearly delivered last night by the announcers (get mammograms!) is aimed at women over 40. One has only to consider the viewership to see that the NFL message hit a relatively small “target” audience. (The NFL audience is 66% men, with an average age of 45 — hence all the ads for beer and erectile dysfunction drugs.)

My point is not that the breast cancer campaign is worthless — or even bad. No doubt, the NFL effort contributes to breast cancer awareness and helps to keep this burdensome disease center stage.

But just think what the NFL could achieve were it more strategic with the health messaging it chooses to endorse rather than simply jumping on the breast cancer bandwagon.

Lauren Taylor is assistant lacrosse coach at Yale, former three-time college All-American, and 2009 graduate of the Yale School of Public Health who now works for the Yale Global Health Leadership Institute.

View Original Post at fairgamenews.com

• Filed Under:  
• Football, Sports, SportsPLUS, Cause/Charity, NFL

• Tags:
• women
• men
• breast cancer
• Football
• NFL
• Lauren Taylor
• Yale
• Money Power & Politics
• health messaging
• Monday Night Football
• prostate cancer
• public health
• testicular cancer
• viewership

There are 2 comments on this post. Join the discussion!

jpalmer

It's about time someone pointed out this discrepency in cancer awareness between genders. Thank you for posting this article!

Monday, October 19, 2009 at 9:30am EDT

29000men

We men do need to talk more about prostate cancer. I believe, however, that men are reluctant to talk about prostate cancer because of fear of the consequences of treatment; incontinence and sexual dysfunction. I also believe that the medical community and media place too much emphasis on these issues without really understanding how widespread these outcomes really are. The current controversy over PSA testing is a good example. The problem is not that too many men are diagnosed with prostate cancer - men either have it or they do not. The issue is with the treatment decisions made once prostate cancer is diagnosed. I will be traveling across the US and back next summer to make this point - details at http://www.tourdeusa.org. We are trying to bring women into our outreach program because they are so much more willing to talk about these issues. Our awareness program uses bicycling events. We have events in Los Angeles and Virginia. Details at the events tab at 29000men.org. Best regards, Robert

Monday, October 19, 2009 at 7:17pm EDT