FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Oct. 31, 2007
Contact: Joshua Hollis
(662) 329-7119

Mini-grant to help promote cancer awareness

COLUMBUS, Miss. – Faculty, staff and students from Mississippi University for Women, as well as individuals from WCBI TV-DT, Baptist Memorial Hospital Golden Triangle, and the Partnership for a Healthy Mississippi are promoting cancer awareness in the Columbus community and surrounding counties thanks to a mini-grant in the amount of $9,100 from the Mississippi State Department of Health.

“Cancer – Beat It!” is a health promotion/education program that will provide the Columbus community and surrounding counties with cancer awareness media messages and initiatives for cancer education and cancer screenings.

The program has two primary goals. First, to increase awareness and preventive education of lung, breast, colorectal, and prostate cancer at MUW and the surrounding area, and second, to provide advocacy for cancer prevention, management, and survivor skills for MUW and the surrounding area.

“Cancer – Beat It!” consists of 344 30-second television vignettes that provide cancer prevention information. WCBI TV-DT will air the spots initially, with them also showing at the MUW Health Fair and the Baptist Memorial Hospital Golden Triangle Cancer (BMHGT) Lunch and Learn sessions. Cancer information materials will be distributed at these initiatives to reinforce cancer awareness messages.

Dr. Joyce Yates, professor of health in the Department of Health and Kinesiology, is serving as co-principal investigator on the project. “It is exciting to be a segment of a partnership that will collaborate on this cancer awareness and prevention mini-grant,” said Yates, adding that the grant will “provide valuable cancer information” to the surrounding community.

Serving as co-principal investigator along with Yates is Dr. Irene Pintado, assistant professor in the Department of Health and Kinesiology. “The grant provides an exciting opportunity for MUW and surrounding communities to work together towards reducing the burden of cancer [in the area],” she said.

One of the partners, the Office of Diversity Education and Programs at MUW, will be focusing on tobacco/smoking as part of “Cancer – Beat It!”
 

Phillip “Flapp” Cockrell, assistant director of Student Life for Diversity Education and Programs, said the office “supports this initiative as it will provide us with an opportunity to better educate the campus and surrounding communities about the uses of tobacco and effects of it. Through a collaborative effort with the other entities involved, we believe we will continue to support [the program’s] mission through promoting and raising awareness about cancer.”
 

A graduate student will assist Yates and Pintado while an undergraduate student will assist Cockrell.
 

BMHGT Center for Cancer Care’s Julie Smith said she was happy to have MUW “as a partner in our cancer patient support programs and our free educational series for cancer survivors and family members which is held monthly at 11:30 a.m. on the third Wednesday, with lunch included.”
Smith said, “We are especially excited to introduce our new patient education computer (located in the Baptist Cancer Institute lobby) and to have MUW students available to help our patients and family members find the latest information about specific cancers, treatments, clinical trials and other resources.”
 

Tami Butler, from WCBI TV-DT, said she was excited to be a partner with MUW in the project and that the broadcast spots will be a “powerful tool in distributing this . . . information.”
 

The Partnership for a Healthy Mississippi’s Rhonda Lampkin said her group is looking forward to assisting in “decreasing cancer disparities in the state of Mississippi.” The group has worked with MUW in the past with an on-campus tobacco prevention program and Lampkin said the program “proved to be very successful.”
 

For more information about “Cancer – Beat It!” contact Yates at 662-329-7225 or Pintado at 662-329-7259.