Kathleen Ruddy MD

I am a breast cancer surgeon whose passion is the PURE CURE: prevention of breast cancer. I completed the first breast fellowship at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in 1995 and then became Medical Director of the Breast Service at Clara Maass Medical Center in Belleville, New Jersey.

In 2006, I headed to Montreal for the first International Masters for Health Leadership at McGill University. My studies took me to Kuwait, where I helped create a breast service for the Royale Hayat Hospital for Women and used WHO grant to establish a mammogram screening program in Uganda.

In 2008, after completing my Masters and returning to my practice, my goals had changed. While I was grateful for the opportunity to take care of so many wonderful women, I was concerned about the unrelenting rise in the incidence of breast cancer around the world and alarmed by the lack of interest shown by major philanthropies and the federal government for primary prevention of the disease.

After repeated attempts at persuading breast cancer foundations to open their minds, and wallets, to what I call, the PURE CURE, I gave up and went home and called my lawyer and created my own foundation, Breast Health & Healing, the first non-profit (501c3) whose mission is "To understand the causes of breast cancer and to use that knowledge to prevent the disease."

In 2007, while studying at McGill University, I had learned of a virus that was discovered in 1936, the mouse mammary tumor virus, whose kissing cousin, the human mammary tumor virus, may be responsible for 40-75% of all breast cancer. Research on this tumor virus is woefully under-funded, yet it may be the biggest cancer killer of women on the planet! Trying to persuade other breast cancer foundations to support this work and hitting walls and dead ends every step of the way was one of the main reasons I felt I had to create the Breast Health & Healing Foundation (BHHF).

The first initiative of BHHF was to create "The Pink Virus Project" whose goal is to answer the question, Does a virus cause breast cancer in women?

On October 9, 2010, I hosted the first annual Breast Cancer Summit for the Pink Virus Project on Capitol Hill. The second Summit took place the following year, and included a discussion of a thrillng breakthrough: creation of the first preventive breast cancer vaccine by Professor Vincent Tuohy of the Cleveland Clinic.