Juan Manuel Moreno’s government has sent a formal request to the Amama women’s association to send it within 10 days “all information, documentation or testimonies” of women affected by the failures of the breast cancer screening program. On Monday, the president of the association, Ángela Claverol, brought the number of women who have suffered delays in diagnosis to almost 4,000, a figure that exceeds the 2,317 offered by the Junta de Andalucía. This discrepancy is what the Ministry of Health claims requires such information from the institution to “generate a discrepancy which, due to its health and social impact, requires immediate clarification”.
Amama’s lawyer, Manuel Jiménez, assured this newspaper that the entity “has no obligation” to provide the Council with any type of information. “Enough with the falsehoods,” he complained.
In the request to which this newspaper had access, the Andalusian Law on Public Health is cited as the legal basis and it is explained that it is formulated to “ensure the exhaustive examination of every possible case not detected by the official circuits, guarantee compliance with the administration’s obligations in terms of surveillance and protection of public health and avoid the generation of social alarm resulting from the dissemination of unverified figures or declarations”. Since the screening scandal broke out, the women of Amama have disagreed with the figures offered by the Council – first it was said that there were “three or four cases”, then it was ensured that they were 2,000 and then the figure of 2,317 – and the affected area – 90% in the Virgen del Rocío hospital in Seville. “I think they act clumsily. If we have the evidence, the women are with us, we deal with real numbers because we have the evidence,” Claverol said on Monday, when he estimated that the women affected were “almost 4,000”.
The Moreno Government manages the figure of 2,317 and with this data has created the so-called ‘shock plan’ of screening so that everyone undergoes a mammogram before November 15th and an ultrasound on the 30th of the same month. These are the quantities that were conveyed in the two meetings of the Commission for Participation and Monitoring of the Breast Cancer Screening Program, whose last meeting Amama attended, even if its president left the table before the end, upset because she had to sign a confidentiality clause. The letter assures that the information provided “will be treated with absolute confidentiality”.
