Residents have a new resource for cancer screening in Western New York, which will now bring services to them.
Roswell Park's new mobile screening center will be the first of its kind in the region.
It's a groundbreaking move, as the first mobile station in the country that provides both breast cancer and prostate cancer screenings, Roswell CEO Candace Johnson said.
“As, like I said, there’s no other like it in the nation," she said. "There are plenty of mammogram buses flying around, but none that really bring together these two cancers, that if they’re caught early, there’s a really good chance of success.”
The Early Detection Driven to You program, or EDDY, will start with a focus in under-served areas outside Buffalo, like parts of Niagara Falls and Orleans County.
follow-up appointments are just as important as early detection, said Veronica Meadows Ray, a breast cancer survivor and Roswell outreach professional.
"If we can catch it early, we don't have to die from it. Breast cancer is not a diagnosis of death," she said. "We don’t have to die from breast cancer, but in our community, but we seem to be doing that. We seem to not be getting that early detection."
Niagara Falls City Council member Brian Archie is a prostate cancer survivor who also has become an advocate in the community. But many people still are hesitant to have those necessary conversations, he said.
"You can't imagine, one, the amount of people that did not want to have that discussion. Two, the amount of people that were not connected at all to a health care system," Archie said. "And three, men I'm talking to you all, those that actually wanted to ignore some of the symptoms that had been happening to them."
This is the second bus in Roswell's EDDY mobile screening unit. Roswell also launched a bus in 2022, which was for lung cancer screening.
