This year's annual Paint the Town Pink campaign in Red Bank, N.J. promises to face the controversial mammogram recommendations from the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF), issued last November.

The campaign, which started in 2007 and hosted by Riverview Medical Center, is a community movement to spread awareness of breast cancer and the importance of women receiving their annual mammogram.

After looking at statistics from the American Cancer Society, Tria Deibert, Riverview Medical Center marketing manager, noticed something unsettling.
"What struck me was that even with all the [breast cancer awareness] 60 percent of New Jersey women were getting mammograms," event organizer Deibert says. "That means 40 percent were not."

Deibert and her Riverview Medical Center team organized a weeklong event that would bring together citizens and businesses every May in an effort to express the importance of yearly mammograms.

"Breast cancer is not a one-time-a-year message," she says. "Everyone tends to do everything in October. We wanted to round out the year."

In response to the new USPSTF guidelines, which suggest that women receive a biennial mammogram starting at age 50 instead of yearly screenings at age 40, this year's panel discussion will focus on the new recommendations.

"I am concerned that these newly revised USPSTF recommendations will reverse the decline in breast cancer mortality rate," said Bokran Won, breast imaging radiologist, in Riverview Medical Center's magazine. "Mammography is the best screening tool for women with average risk for breast cancer."

Phillipa Woodriffe, surgeon and director of medical staff at Riverview, hopes this event, which features daily activities, including a discussion, an 80s-themed party and a Girl's Night Out, will alert women of the importance of annual mammograms.

"Personally, I am concerned that [the new recommendations are] much more of a political and financial issue than something that is to the advantage of the female populations," says Woodriffe, a breast cancer survivor whose cancer was detected during a yearly screening. "There are too many people that would have been ignored if that was the norm."

Event organizers work to get community women pledging that they will have a yearly mammogram, says Deibert. The campaign's first year had 125 women pledging, and last year it had 550 women.

Deibert explains that in October, when there is a high volume of breast cancer awareness activities, Riverview Medical Center will call women who pledged to remind them to schedule a mammogram.

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