A VICIOUS serial killer with a preference for Black men is stalking the nation’s males with a deadly efficiency that makes the most notorious mass murderers look like amateurs. Dubbed “the silent enemy” because there is no prior warning, the killer preys largely on men “in the prime of fife.” Experts in tracking the killer warn that if you are a Black male and 40 years old if older, the next victim could easily be YOU!

Each year, prostate cancer, the killer disease, claims the lives of some 30,000 men nationwide, with Black men dying at a rate that’s three times higher than that of their White counterparts. If the killer disease isn’t stopped, medical experts predict, its toll will rise substantially in the years to come due to the increasingly age of the U.S. population.

So much for the bad news.

The good news is that prostate cancer can be stopped provided its potential victims cooperate. To cooperate, says Dr. Terry Mason, a prominent Chicago urologist, men age 40 and older need to do no more an submit to at least one medical prostate check each year in order to detect the presence of cancer in its earliest, most treatable stage. But there’s the rub. For a variety of reasons, men have been studiously avoiding to do the right thing, some because of the indelicate nature of a rectal examination via a physician’s educated, rubber-gloved finger, some because of fear of what the examination might reveal and some because of indifference or ignorance.

The situation is exacerbated, Dr. Mason says, by the fact that early prostate cancer produces absolutely no symptoms. “You don’t need to feel anything to know that there’s a problem,” he explains. “That’s why it is so hard to get men to deal with this. Black men in particular only come to doctors when bones are sticking out, when they are bleeding all over the place or when they feel so bad that it seems they can’t make it anymore.”

The result of this pervasive neglect has been a tragic, unnecessary waste of lives since some of the more overt symptoms of the disease — blood in the urine, painful and frequent urinating or the inability to urinate at all — often surface only after it is too late. Too late, Dr. Mason explains, means that the cancer has spread beyond the prostate gland and invaded other parts of the body.

A great deal of what causes the walnut-size gland at the base of the urinary tube that produces much of the semen to become cancerous is still every doctor’s guess. Unlike several other types of cancer, prostate cancer has no known cause or trigger, such as smoking in the case of lung cancer, and no specific dietary or environmental links have been positively identified. That means that at the present there is not much men can do, or stop doing, to minimize the risk of developing the disease. Another characteristic that distinguishes prostate cancer from other cancers is the fact that it can lie dormant for years without producing any symptoms or health problems whatsoever until one day — for no known reason — it may strike.

While Black men, according to the American Cancer Society, have the highest incidence of prostate cancer of any racial or ethnic group in the United States (1 out of 9 for Blacks, compared with 1 out of 11 for Whites), the reasons for this disparity are still shrouded in mystery. “The urology section of the National Medical Association is taking a very hard look and trying to identify what may be some of the factors,” says Dr. Mason, “but we’re not yet sure. Some people think that high fat diets might be implicated. it definitely appears that prostate cancer runs in families, much like diabetes. There are even some suggestions that if you have a living female relative who had breast cancer, there may be a higher incidence for you to develop prostate cancer. But none of it has been totally proven.”

Some researchers attribute the higher prostate cancer rate among Blacks to economic factors rather than race per se, pointing out that there is also a strong correlation between prostate cancer and poverty. Poor people, they say, all too often lack health information, health insurance and thus access to proper health care facilities, and, as a result, fall victim to life-threatening diseases that routine health examinations by a physician could have easily prevented.

Since physicians’ success in stopping prostate cancer before it kills depends entirely on early detection, science has developed new diagnostic tools that substantially supplement the digital examination. Doctors report that these new tests have dramatically increased their ability to detect cancers while they are still curable. One of these relatively new diagnostic methods is a blood test that measures levels of prostate-specific antigen (PSA), a protein produced exclusively in the prostate gland. Elevated PSA levels in the bloodstream may indicate the presence of cancer cells in the prostate long before they have spread to other parts of the body. Another new diagnostic tool is the transrectal ultrasound, which employs ultrasound waves that make the size and shape of the prostate visible on a screen, and can pinpoint suspicious areas without the use of surgery. Each of these tests is relatively simple to administer and takes only a few minutes.