Cancer prevention advocate honours parents in drive to promote testing

Bibi Sheonarine with her parents and some of her siblings in happier times

After losing her mother to cervical cancer, Bibi Sheonarine thought she took all the necessary preventative actions to ensure her surviving parent was healthy. But years later she received the shocking news that her father was also stricken with cancer and after a valiant fight he also succumbed.

Reeling from the double tragedy, Sheonarine is now on a mission to ensure that Guyanese women take preventative actions by having regular pap smears and mammograms done and shortly also for men to have access to free testing for prostate cancer.

“Cancer is a disease if it is caught in stage one and two you have an excellent chance of survival. But when it is third and fourth stage you have to go through massive chemotherapy and radiation which is what ends up killing you; the treatment is what kills people,” she told the Sunday Stabroek in an interview.