Breast cancer stamp tops post office's best-seller list
By Dorsey Griffith -- Bee Medical Writer
Published 2:15 a.m. PST Tuesday, March 23, 2004

The breast cancer awareness postage stamp, the brainchild of Sacramento
surgeon Ernie Bodai, has become the biggest-selling stamp in U.S. Postal
Service history.
The postal service has sold 518.5 million of the stamps since its release in
1998, and has raised $37.1 million for breast cancer research as of the end
of February, said Ralph Petty, spokesman for the Sacramento postal service
district.

With the stamp's two-year extension approved in January, Bodai had hoped it
would surpass sales of the commemorative Elvis Presley stamp. That stamp,
which sold 517 million, is no longer on the market.

"The postal service does not like to pit stamps against each other," Petty
said. "But this is quite an accomplishment for the breast cancer research
stamp. And Elvis is still the king of commemorative stamps."

Bodai said he hopes to take his campaign to other countries. He said
singer/actress Olivia Newton-John, with whom he has teamed to market a
breast examination pad, is interested in getting a similar stamp approved in
Australia.

"My new motto is: 'We're not going postal, we are going global,' " Bodai
said.

Because of the success of the breast cancer stamp, which is the first
so-called semi-postal stamp created in the United States to raise funds,
Congress has approved two other semi-postals.

The postal service has sold 116.3 million of the new Heroes stamp; since
June 2002 it has raised $9.3 million for families of emergency workers lost
in the Sept. 11 attacks. It also has sold 10.4 million of the Stop Family
Violence stamp since its debut in October 2003.

All three first-class stamps cost 45 cents; the difference between the price
of the stamp and the cost of mailing a first-class letter goes to the
various causes, after expenses.

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