It’s Movember. That’s not a spelling mistake, it’s a charity fundraiser!

I have the honour of living in the city where Movember originated, so along with the flowers of late spring comes the blossoming of facial hair. It’s the one time of year guys can grow a handlebar or Hitler moustache and be considered a model citizen.

Movember raises funds for men’s health issues, such as prostate cancer. It’s a great example of an innovative fundraising campaign for a good cause – relevant, distinctive and a great source of material for the media.

Now I’ve said those nice things about Movember, I’m going to criticise the Prostate Cancer Foundation of Australia.

It’s come to my attention that the prostate foundation is promoting barbecues to raise funds. Whether or not they’ve actually been giving out free mini-barbecues as one of these comments said, they definitely promote barbecues on their website.

This is a pretty irresponsible campaign, given that barbecued red meat has been associated with increased cancer risk (as reported here, here here and here), including of the
prostate.

Granted, the charred red meat and cancer risk association isn’t bulletproof. But when you have a fantastic campaign like Movember, why also push a hackneyed fundraising method like hosting a barbecue, especially when you might be encouraging behaviour that increases risk for the cancer you’re trying to prevent?

A cynic might say the prostate cancer foundation is keeping itself in business, but I don’t think they have sinister intentions. I hope they just haven’t thought about it yet. And now that they do thanks to the wonders of the interwebs, I think if they still want to encourage barbecue fundraisers, they should also publicise information about how to make barbecues healthier.

Or maybe they can hire the PR team who succeeded in marketing the cervical cancer vaccine as that, rather than the human papillomavirus vaccine, to develop a campaign to get men to eat salads instead of charred red meat.

Correction: someone just emailed to inform me that the men’s health fundraiser started in Melbourne. Though my memory wasn’t just pro-Adelaide folklore; the Wikipedia entry says the Movember trend started in Adelaide in 1999, but it was to raise money for RSPCA under the slogan “growing whiskers for whiskers”. It refers to a 1999 Channel Seven story you can watch on YouTube.