Are you dense? It sounds offensive, but it’s a question Canadians need to be asking, say advocates of a growing awareness campaign about breast density and its relation to increased cancer risk.

A letter from 130 experts on breast cancer says new screening guidelines proposed by the Canadian Task Force on Preventive Health Care are outdated and “dangerous.”

If a Canadian wide-body jet crashed due to maintenance problems, killing all 400 people onboard, it would viewed as a national disaster and would occupy the news for weeks. If this happened each year it would be seen as an epidemic.

Canadian women should be outraged. The Canadian Task Force on Preventive Health (CTF) released its latest guidelines for screening for breast cancer for women at average risk.

This year, more than 26,000 women in Canada will be diagnosed with breast cancer, and 5,000 will die of it. A new guideline published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal are meant to save lives through early detection. But critics have their doubts.

Canada’s new breast screening guidelines will cause unnecessary deaths and harm and should be ignored by women and their family physicians, say two of this country’s leading breast screening experts.

Health minister Adrian Dix’s announcement that B.C. will be the first province to notify women if they have dense breasts after screening mammograms, and may therefore be at higher risk of cancer, has led to some concerns and confusion about how the information should be used.

When Ann Hill was told she had breast cancer, she was floored. Six months earlier, she had a clear mammogram and the diagnosis seemingly came out of nowhere. But that’s when a doctor told her having dense breasts makes a tumour hard to see, and that her cancer has been there for a while.

Dense breasts make it harder to spot cancer in mammograms — but not all affected women know they’re at risk. In 2014, Michelle Di Tomaso was in her doctor’s office after work when she heard the words she’ll never forget. “She just turned to me and said, ‘You have breast cancer,’” Di Tomaso recalled.