For Immediate Release
Office of the First Lady
March 13, 2008

Mrs. Bush's Remarks at a Social Reception with Outstanding Mexican Women
Los Pinos-Salon Adolfo Lopez Mateos
Mexico City, Mexico

En Español

6:47 P.M. (Local)

MRS. BUSH: Thank you very much, Margarita. Thank you. I just want to thank you very much for hosting this wonderful reception with so many talented women here today. I hope I'll have a chance to speak to many of you before the reception is over.

I also want to recognize you, Margarita, for your tireless work on behalf of the children of Mexico and the women of Mexico.

And as Margarita told you, I'm here to launch, we're going to launch together, the U.S.-Mexico Partnership for Breast Cancer Research. This is a partnership that will work -- both the National Cancer Institute in Mexico and M.D. Anderson Cancer Hospital in Houston will join together with the Susan Komen Foundation, which is the foundation that about 20 years ago in the United States started talking about breast cancer so that American women actually talked about breast cancer. They weren't secret about it. They started wearing the pink ribbon, running in Races for the Cure. And when they did that, then they made sure they got a yearly mammogram, they did breast self-exams, so if they did have breast cancer, they could discover it in an early enough stage that they would be able to be cured.

Last fall, in October, I was in four countries in the Middle East -- the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait -- to start the U.S.-Middle East Partnership for Breast Cancer Awareness. For some reason, they have a very high incidence of breast cancer in the Middle East, and they present younger, about 10 years younger than Western women do. And so this is I see a really wonderful opportunity for women around the world to reach out to each other, to have a sisterhood while we talk about ways we can protect women's health and ways that women can be in charge of their own health by making sure they have the screenings to know whether or not they have breast cancer and to get treatment as soon as possible.

And of course, those women in the Middle East also did not talk about breast cancer. It was not something they mentioned. They were ashamed if they were diagnosed with breast cancer. And that's the message we want to get out to women, that you don't have to be that way, and we can talk about it. And if we do talk about it with each other and get the word out to each other, then we can save lives.

So I'm so happy to be with Margarita in this opportunity for our two countries, the United States and Mexico, to work together to save women's lives from breast cancer.

Thank you so much, Margarita. Thank you very much. (Applause.)

END 6:53 P.M. (Local)

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