Canadian breast cancer foundation

THEY MAKE THE CHEMICALS, THEY RUN THE TREATMENT CENTERS, AND THEY'RE STILL LOOKING FOR "THE CURE"--NO WONDER THEY WON'T TELL YOU ABOUT BREAST CANCER PREVENTION

EVERY OCTOBER, THE SPONSORS OF NATIONAL BREAST CANCER AWARENESS MONTH GO INTOoverdrive to spread their message, "Early detection is your best protection." Organizers stage walks, hikes, races, and other events around the country "to fill the information void in public communication about breast cancer"--the sponsors' official goal. For the most part that void is filled with the mantra: "Get a mammogram." As for reducing risk, the campaign's elaborate 1998 promotion kit says only that "current research is investigating the roles of obesity, hormone replacement therapy, diet, and alcohol use."

In other words, the people who bring you Breast Cancer Awareness Month tell you to find out if you already have the disease. And they tell you to take personal responsibility for staving off what's become a scourge throughout the country. What they go to great lengths to avoid telling you is what the country can do to help stop the scourge at its source.

It's no mystery why prevention gets the silent treatment. The primary sponsor of Breast Cancer Awareness Month, AstraZeneca (formerly known as Zeneca), is a British-based multinational giant that manufactures the cancer drug tamoxifen as well as fungicides and herbicides, including the carcinogen acetochlor. Its Perry, Ohio, chemical plant is the third-largest source of potential cancer-causing pollution in the United States, releasing 53,000 pounds of recognized carcinogens into the air in 1996. When Zeneca created Breast Cancer Awareness Month in 1985, it was owned by Imperial Chemical Industries, a multibillion-dollar producer of pesticides, paper, and plastics. State and federal agencies sued ICI in 1990, alleging that it dumped DDT and PCBs--both banned in the United States since the 1970s--in Los Angeles and Long Beach harbors. Any mention of what role such chemicals may be playing in rising breast cancer rates is missing from Breast Cancer Awareness Month promos.

After acquiring the Salick chain of cancer treatment centers in 1997, Zeneca merged with the Swedish pharmaceutical company Astra this year to form AstraZeneca, creating the world's third-largest drug concern, valued at $67 billion. "This is a conflict of interest unparalleled in the history of American medicine," says Dr. Samuel Epstein, a professor of occupational and environmental medicine at the University of Illinois School of Public Health. "You've got a company that's a spinoff of one of the world's biggest manufacturers of carcinogenic chemicals, they've got control of breast cancer treatment, they've got control of the chemoprevention [studies], and now they have control of cancer treatment in eleven centers--which are clearly going to be prescribing the drugs they manufacture."

Even the nation's leading cancer organizations are not immune from corporate influence. The American Cancer Society has the vice president of a major herbicide manufacturer sitting on its board of directors. High-ranking officials in the National Cancer Institute routinely accept lucrative posts in the cancer-drug industry. Such tangled financial interests explain why the cancer establishment--the medical institutions, corporations, and agencies that control cancer research, treatment, and education--continues to ignore mounting evidence that many cases of cancer are avoidable.

These conflicts may also help explain why, 28 years and billions of dollars after President Nixon declared war on cancer, the risk of breast cancer is higher than ever. In 1950, an American woman faced a lifetime risk of 1 in 20; today that risk has more than doubled to 1 in 8. Breast cancer will strike some 175,000 women in the United States in 1999, and kill 43,000. The cancer business is booming, but the selective brand of awareness the cancer industry promotes comes at a price.

SAMUEL EPSTEIN PREDICTED 30 YEARS AGO THAT CANCER rates would increase, citing an explosion in the use of synthetic chemicals. From 1940 through the early 1980s, production of synthetic chemicals increased by a factor of 350. Billions of tons of substances that never existed before were released into the environment. Yet only some 3 percent of the 75,000 or so chemicals in use have been tested for safety. Forty of them are recognized human carcinogens.

The widespread presence of carcinogens in our environment is clearly linked to rising cancer rates, Epstein says. He points to a number of avoidable risk factors, but pollution, estrogenic medications, toxic ingredients in consumer products, and carcinogens in the workplace top his list of culprits. One thing ties all these things together, he says: "Corporate recklessness."

Signs of that recklessness are most evident in the workplace. Of 4 million women employed in the chemical industry, Epstein says, "about a million are exposed to chemicals which have been shown to cause breast cancer in rodents." In cases where scientists conducted epidemiological studies, women exposed to these chemicals had higher rates of breast cancer. Evidence that women in the plastics industry face increased risk emerged over 20 years ago. A study published in the Journal of Occupational Medicine in 1977 noted higher-than-expected breast cancer deaths in women exposed to vinyl chloride, which not only produces mammary tumors in animals even at very low doses but causes breast, liver, brain, and nervous-system cancers in humans.

Living near hazardous-waste sites also appears to increase risk. "A number of intriguing studies show that breast cancer rates are higher in places that have toxic-waste dumps," says Sandra Steingraber, who explored the links between toxic hot spots and cancer incidence in her book Living Downstream (see "Rachel's Daughter," above). A 1985 study published in the International Journal of Epidemiology found that in New Jersey--a state with 111 Superfund sites--breast cancer mortality among white women increased the closer they lived to a dump site.

Many of these chemicals--and waste dumps--are produced by companies with a financial interest in cancer products. "General Electric is a major polluter in PCBs in the Hudson River. GE also manufactures mammogram machines," says Ross Hume Hall, a biochemist who advised the Canadian government on environmental issues in the 1980s.

An estimated million pounds of PCBs lie buried at the bottom of a 40-mile stretch of the Hudson, where GE dumped PCB oil until the mid-1970s, contaminating the entire 200-mile length of the river below Hudson Falls. Although PCBs (a family of 209 organochlorine chemicals) were banned in 1977, the chemicals persist in soil, air, lakes, and oceans. Classified by the EPA as probable human carcinogens, PCBs are found in the fatty tissue, sperm, blood, and milk of animals and humans the world over. Although PCBs vary in their effects, several studies link some PCBs to human breast cancer.

Faced with a government-proposed cleanup plan that would cost hundreds of millions of dollars, GE launched a local media offensive assailing the measure as unnecessary because the river is "cleaning itself." These PR efforts (which happened to be aimed at a community with one of the highest breast cancer rates in the United States) prompted EPA Administrator Carol Browner to complain to the New York Assembly in 1998: "GE would have the people of the Hudson River believe, and I quote, `living in a PCB-laden area is not dangerous.' The science tells us the opposite is true."

Responding to mounting evidence of organochlorines' harm, in 1992 a staid scientific advisory group, the International Joint Commission (IJC), proposed a global phaseout of whole classes of the roughly 15,000 chlorinated compounds in use. (The IJC advises the U.S. and Canadian governments on pollution in the Great Lakes region.) Among the evidence was research from Israel showing that three organochlorine pesticides detected in milk and other dairy products caused 12 types of cancer in 10 different strains of rats and mice. After public outcry in 1978 forced the Israeli government to ban the pesticides--benzene hexachloride, DDT, and lindane--something remarkable happened. Breast cancer mortality rates, which had increased every year for 25 years, dropped nearly 8 percent for all age groups and more than a third for women ages 25 to 34 by 1986.

Unimpressed by such findings, the American Cancer Society (ACS) sided with the Chlorine Institute and issued a joint statement against the phaseout. This alliance between the world's largest cancer charity and the chemical industry, says Epstein, amounts to a "frank hostility" to prevention.