OCU Students Hold Up Signs, Photos To Encourage Support Of â€˜ Johannaâ€™s Lawâ€™

Thursday, December 7th 2006, 6:14 am

By: News On 6

OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) -- About a dozen Oklahoma City University students held up signs and photographs to encourage Senator Tom Coburn to support legislation about gynecologic cancers.

Members of the Gamma Phi Beta sorority want Coburn and others to back "Johanna's Law," a measure named after a retired teacher who died of ovarian cancer in 2000 at the age of 58.

They also held up pictures Wednesday of one of their sorority sisters from Pryor who died of cancer in 2005 after not knowing she had the disease until its advanced stages.

Johanna's Law would create a national public awareness campaign to increase knowledge about gynecologic cancers.

Coburn's office says he supports the measure but wants to improve on it by forcing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to implement a measure he had passed as a member of the US House of Representatives in 2000.

Coburn's spokesman says the senator supports the concept but is concerned that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention didn't enact a provision that calls for including information about condoms' ineffectiveness in protecting against a sexually transmitted disease linked to cervical cancer.