Cancer can affect anyone, but it doesn’t affect everyone equally. Different social and economic barriers can impact your experience with cancer, including your ability to protect yourself against cancer, how early you find the cancer you do get, and how effective treatment is at beating your cancer.

Social and economic barriers impacting cancer can include:

• Poverty
• Racism
• Discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity
• Access to healthcare, affordable foods, education, and housing

These challenges can affect every aspect of cancer, from preventing cancer to finding appropriate treatment to survival. 

For example, Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) are disparately impacted by cancer and experience greater roadblocks to accessing cancer prevention, detection, and treatment, all of which ultimately impacts survival rates. It must be noted that genetics are only responsible for a small amount of the racial differences in cancer outcomes. The majority of racial differences in cancer are due to the negative impacts of racism that are deeply entrenched in our society. Racism is a threat to public health. It has created inequities in access to a range of economic and social opportunities, including housing, education, social support networks, wealth, and employment. Each of these directly impacts the BIPOC community’s cancer reality.

Additionally, disparities are also present in the LGBTQIA+ community that impact their overall experience with cancer. While research has found that at least seven types of cancer disproportionately affect LGBTQIA+ people, they are routinely underrepresented in cancer registries and surveys, leading them to be underrepresented in statistics and research findings.  The LGBTQIA+ population also faces unique barriers when accessing the health care system, which can result in disparities in cancer risk, prevention, diagnoses, treatment, and survival.  

At Fuck Cancer, we are dedicated to advancing health equity to ensure that everyone has an equal opportunity to be as healthy as possible and to prevent cancer, find it early, and get appropriate treatment and care.

To achieve our goals, we create education campaigns to speak directly to communities who need the information the most, champion support groups that fill the gap for underserved communities, and sponsor community health clinics to ensure high-risk populations have access to proper cancer prevention and screening.

Learn more about our programs here.