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Skriven 2006-02-09 23:39:58 av Whitehouse Press (1:3634/12.0)
Ärende: Press Release (0602093) for Thu, 2006 Feb 9
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Mrs. Bush's Remarks at a Komen Italia Breast Cancer Event in Rome, Italy
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For Immediate Release
Office of the First Lady
February 9, 2006

Mrs. Bush's Remarks at a Komen Italia Breast Cancer Event in Rome, Italy
Gemelli Hospital
Rome, Italy


˙˙˙˙˙Women's Health and Wellness

4:23 P.M. (Local)

MRS. BUSH: Well, thank you very much. This was a thrill to be here for the
first Komen Italia award. Marisa, as you all heard, developed a postage
stamp. She'd worked for the postal -- Italian postal service for years, and
so she thought to develop a stamp, a special stamp of breast cancer
awareness.

And I'm so excited to be here. I've worked for the Komen Foundation for
years, long before my husband was elected to office. When I lived in
Dallas, I was very good friends with Nancy Brinker, whose sister, Susan
Komen, had died of breast cancer at a very young age. And Nancy had started
the Komen Foundation to honor her sister.

But when Nancy started the Komen Foundation, American women didn't really
talk about breast cancer. It was embarrassing, it was something you never
admitted if you had breast cancer. You didn't reach out to other women or
to other survivors to get support. And then really, with the foundation of
the Komen, the Race for the Cure, the encouragement to get a mammogram, to
see your doctor, to see if you can detect it early, because right now
that's the only cure, is early detection. And since the Komen Foundation
has started, now much, much more money is appropriated from the United
States government to the NIH, the National Institutes of Health, for breast
cancer research, and then a lot of money is raised privately to -- through
the Race for the Cure and other fundraisers, to support women who have
breast cancer, to reach out to women, to make the brochures and all of the
things that each of our panelists were talking about today.

We are all so happy to be here. As you know, we're here to go to Torino
tomorrow to the opening ceremonies of the Olympics. And so I thought you
all might want to meet our delegation. We have some former American
Olympians who are part of the delegation, and I thought you might want to
meet them.

First, Dr. Debi Thomas, who is standing right here. (Applause.) Dr. Thomas
is a figure skater. She won the bronze medal in Calgary, and she's now an
orthopedic surgeon. We have another doctor with us, Dr. Eric Heiden.
(Applause.) He is an Olympic gold medalist speed skater. He was the first
to win all five of the speed skating gold medals at once, I guess. Is that
right, Eric? And he's also an orthopedic doctor. I think it's interesting
that these athletes are all now working on people's bones and joints.
(Laughter.) Miss Kerri Strug, Olympic gold medal gymnast. (Applause.) And a
favorite of all Americans, Dorothy Hamill. (Applause.) Dorothy won gold
medalist in the '76 games in Austria, and she still skates in the United
States. A lot of people love to see her. Then we'll be joined tonight by
Herschel Walker, who is known in the United States for being a football
player. He was a Dallas Cowboy, our favorite football team. But he was also
a bobsledder. So he's going to join us tonight and be part of our -- the
rest of our delegation.

There's something that's very exciting and hopeful about Olympics. It gives
us a chance to be together, a lot of countries together, to make new
friends and to renew old friendships. And we're very, very proud to be the
delegates of the United States to the Olympics here in Italy.

But there's also really something exciting and hopeful about all the new
research about breast cancer, about the new treatments, the new early
detection. There is a lot of research now in ways we can use mammography in
a much more effective way to determine whether or not they're tumors so
early that to remove them will be a very minor thing, rather than a
mastectomy.

So I'm so excited to be here with all of you, and to be with these women
who are breast cancer survivors, who are reaching out to other people who
have breast cancer and are reaching out all across their country to talk to
women, to encourage women to get the checkup, to have the mammogram, and if
you find a tumor, to immediately seek treatment and to be knowledgeable
about the treatment you're seeking, to be a full partner in your care.

So thank you all so much. Thank you for coming. Marisa, congratulations.
Thank you for your great work for breast cancer research in Italy. And
thanks to everyone who's been an active volunteer in the Komen Italia.
Thank you all. (Applause.)

END 4:28 P.M. (Local)
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