Blind women 'seeing' cancer with their fingertips
Disease swept away one sense but sharpened another, and their heightened sense of touch has become a valuable weapon in Colombia's fight against breast cancer. Francia Papamija is one of five blind or visually impaired women trained at Cali, Colombia's San Juan de Dios Hospital to use their fingertips to detect breast cancer (AFP) Leidy Garcia awoke one morning in 2011 to discover she could no longer see. By then, Francia Papamija was already blind. Disease swept away one sense but sharpened another, and their heightened sense of touch has become a valuable weapon in Colombia 's fight against breast cancer. Garcia and Papamija are two of five women who are blind or visually impaired who have been specially trained to use their fingertips to detect breast cancer, one of Colombia's biggest killers. The disease is responsible for 2,500 deaths annually in Colombia, where 7,000 new cases are detected each year in a country where sophisticated detection equip