Jennifer Griffin, a Fox News war correspondent, spent years covering conflict in the middle east. She is now bringing attention to a fight that personally affected her and millions of women around the world.
On September 28, 2000, Ariel Sharon set foot on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem at what turned into the start of the Palestinian Intifada. I was there that day and stood near Jerusalem's Western Wall as rocks began flying down onto Jewish worshipers and Israeli soldiers fired on rioting Palestinians.

Nine years to the day later, I was diagnosed with a 9-centimeter tumor in my breast. I was told I had triple negative breast cancer, a type of aggressive cancer that strikes young women. So on September 28, 2009, I began my own intifada against breast cancer ("intifada" in Arabic means "throwing off"). The cancer had set up a base in my right breast and needed to literally be "thrown off."

It is fitting that after a long winter and a complete pathologic response to chemo—meaning there is no evidence of disease left—I would help Susan G. Komen for a Cure bring the first Race for a Cure to Jerusalem this October.

Susan G. Komen's sister, Nancy Brinker, promised her sister who was dying of breast cancer 27 years ago that she would end this scourge. The first race was held in Texas for 800 participants. This year alone, 1.5 million people worldwide will race. Jerusalem will be just one of 17 international races, but it is significant that the race will finally go to Jerusalem—a city holy to the world's three monotheistic religions, a city that means so much to me and my family.

My husband, Greg Myre, and I lived there for nearly eight years covering every day of the intifada. He worked for the New York Times and Associated Press. I covered the story for Fox News. Our two daughters were born in Jerusalem, in a delivery room at Haddassah Mt. Scopus hospital overlooking the Old City walls. I wore a flak jacket most days to work as I covered the fighting during my two pregnancies. Little did I know that the real danger to my life was sitting inside my breast.

Israel is significant in the Global Fight Against breast cancer because it received Komen's first international Promise grant and its scientists were among the first to map the BRCA1 gene that is inherited by many breast cancer patients, a huge step forward in terms of screening and prevention of breast cancer deaths. Many of our sisters who are BRCA1 positive have opted for prophylactic mastectomies that have saved their lives. E.D. Hill, my former colleague at Fox, is one of them.

Around the world this year, more than 1.3 million new breast cancer cases will be diagnosed and more than 465,000 people will die from the disease. According to Komen statistics, every 68 seconds, a woman somewhere in the world dies from breast cancer. When Greg and I lived in Pakistan in the early 1990s, the world's second-largest Muslim country did not have a cancer hospital until Imran Khan, the famous World Cup cricket star then married to Jemima Goldsmith, built one in Lahore in honor of his mother who died of the disease. It had the country's first CT scan, if you can imagine. That was less than 20 years ago.

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