Hi, Atlanta! 

I’ve spent the past week learning about an important — if little known — program that exemplifies the bread and butter of public health: a straightforward screening program, without a lot of bells and whistles, that helps low-income women get cancer screening services. 

Over the past five years, the program has screened about 26,000 women in Georgia for breast cancer and found 478 cases, according to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

I spoke to Faye Wong, who helped build the program at its start at the CDC in the 1990s. 

“In those years, the number of women that were diagnosed with cancer was too high, the number of women who were dying from a preventable cancer, like breast cancer, was too high, especially among low-income, disadvantaged populations,” Wong said, explaining why Congress initially funded the program. 

Since then, the CDC has played a key role in distributing funds for the program to states and territories and collecting data on how it works. 

It’s a prime example of the kind of federal-state partnerships that make up much of the public health infrastructure in the United States. In Georgia, three buckets of funding make up the program’s $8.6 million budget:

• $4.4 million in federal funds, through the CDC 

• $1.9 million in state general funds 

• $2.3 million in state funds from the 1998 settlement between major tobacco companies and states for health care costs related to tobacco 

Wong said states have flexibility to implement the program in a way that works well for their communities, giving the example of women in Alaska’s remote areas who are flown to Anchorage to get mammograms. Here in Georgia, women can access these services at their local health departments. 

Wong and Molly Guthrie from nonprofit Susan G. Komen told me that, as for many other CDC programs, there is uncertainty over the funding for this program in next year’s budget. While President Donald Trump’s initial budget proposal would have eliminated the program, the latest versions of the House and Senate budgets retain funding for it. 

Wong emphasized that this is a longstanding program that has worked well for Americans across the political spectrum. 

“It's not a Republican or Democrat issue. It's a women's issue. It's a preventable health issue … Mammography is currently one of the most effective ways of reducing breast cancer mortality by finding women early to get them into treatment. It's actually morally wrong not to screen women,” Wong said. 

Morehouse School of Medicine is embarking on a study to learn why more women don’t take advantage of the free or low-cost screenings.

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