Ignoring Causes Highly Profitable

[Guest guest]

Ignoring Causes Highly Profitable:

Sponsors of National Breast Cancer Awareness Month - Make Billions From Cancer

http://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/199909/cancer.asp

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. by Sharon Batt & Liza Gross.

Every October, the sponsors of National Breast Cancer Awareness Month go into

overdrive 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 , 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 t

hat 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. 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.

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 Steingraber, who explored the links

between toxic hot spots and cancer incidence in her book Living Downstream

(see " 's Daughter " ). 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.

The American Cancer Society was founded with the support of the Rockefeller

family in 1913. Members of the chemical and pharmaceutical industry have long

had a place on its board. The society strengthened its industry ties in 1992,

when it created the American Cancer Society Foundation to solicit

contributions over $100,000. The foundation's corporate-heavy board of

trustees includes Bethune, president of the multinational drug company

Lederle Laboratories and vice president of American Cyanamid, a manufacturer

of chemical fertilizers and herbicides.

The Cancer Society's anti-prevention efforts include opposing the now-defunct

Delaney Clause, passed in 1958 to safeguard food from substances that cause

cancer in animals, because the law " would severely limit the use of valuable

pesticides and food additives and...probably increase food costs. " In 1977

and 1978, it opposed regulations for hair dyes that cause mammary and liver

cancer in rodents. And since 1982, the ACS has insisted on unequivocal proof

that a substance causes cancer in humans before taking a position on public

health hazards.

Ironically, this is the posture of the tobacco industry, which the ACS has

long battled, and explains why decades after the U.S. Surgeon General warned

in 1964 that smoking causes lung cancer, tobacco executives were still saying

that smoking isn't dangerous. It was the Surgeon General's

courage to act on what Steingraber calls " good but partial evidence " that

would protect people " while the wheels of science slowly grind on. "

Thirty-two years later, scientists finally isolated the carcinogenic agent in

smoke and determined exactly how it causes lung cancer. True to form, the

Cancer Society's latest report on cancer prevention, the 1998 " Cancer Risk

Report: Prevention and Control, " makes no mention of environmental factors.

The primary source of support for cancer research in the United States comes

from the federally funded National Cancer Institute (NCI). Senior executives

in both the Cancer Society and the Cancer Institute routinely move through a

revolving door to board and executive posts at companies that make

cancer-treatment drugs.

Such conflicts of interest extend to the petrochemical industry. While

serving as chairman of the National Cancer Advisory Panel (a three-member

committee appointed by the president) in 1990, Armand Hammer announced a

drive to add a billion dollars to the NCI's budget " to find a cure for

cancer in the next ten years. " At the time, he was also chairman of

Occidental Petroleum, which would later have to pay the federal government

$129 million and New York State $98 million to clean up its infamous toxic

dump, Love Canal.

It's no surprise, then, that reducing exposures to environmental carcinogens

gets short shrift in the NCI's breast cancer prevention efforts, and that the

agency embraced a study in " chemoprevention " in 1992. The Breast Cancer

Prevention Trial, involving over 13,000 women throughout North America, was

designed to see if the chemotherapy drug tamoxifen would reduce the risk of

breast cancer in healthy women. Zeneca supplied the tamoxifen, and the NCI

provided $50 million in funding. With activists demanding prevention, says

Pearson, executive director of the

National Women's Health Network, " the NCI needed a prevention initiative. "

It chose what seemed the easiest way to go-a pill.

Pearson's group opposed the study at a Food and Drug Administration hearing.

" Tamoxifen shouldn't even be mentioned in the same breath as population-wide

prevention, " she says. Studies later revealed that the women on tamoxifen

developed 44 percent fewer breast cancers, but twice as

many endometrial cancers, three times as many blood clots in their lungs, and

160 percent more strokes and blood clots in their legs. (Major studies in

Italy and Britain found no reduction of breast cancer risk.) In October 1998,

the FDA approved tamoxifen for healthy women at " high risk, "

expanding AstraZeneca's $526 million market for the drug to some 29 million

more women.

The National Cancer Institute's latest " prevention initiative " will compare

tamoxifen and Eli Lilly's raloxifene-another drug that appears to reduce

breast cancer risk-in tests on 22,000 women in the United States and Canada.

While these advances in chemoprevention win funding and acclaim, less-toxic

prevention efforts have met fierce resistance. When the International Joint

Commission launched its organochlorine phaseout, the chemical industry first

responded with a media offensive attacking the proposal, then went

after women's-health activists. In a memo prepared for the Chlorine Chemistry

Council, the public-relations firm Mongoven, Biscoe and Duchin outlined a

strategy to " mobilize science against the precautionary principle " -the idea

that when there is evidence of serious risks to public health, we must act to

reduce those risks even in the absence of absolute proof. Singled out was a

series of conferences on organochlorines and women's health in 1994 that

featured a keynote talk by Dr. Devra Lee on synthetic chemicals. ,

an epidemiologist, was a health-policy advisor in the Clinton administration

at the time, a post the memo complained gave her " unlimited access to the

media " and helped validate her " junk science. "

Industry's efforts to stifle evidence of environmental links to breast cancer

has even infiltrated the medical journals. Two incidents that grabbed

national headlines involved The New England Journal of Medicine in 1997. The

first, an editorial by toxicologist Safe of Texas A & M University,

reviewed studies correlating chemical residues in blood samples with

increased breast cancer risk. Safe judged the evidence unconvincing,

dismissing public concerns as " chemophobia. " The Journal did not disclose

that Safe had received research funds from the Chemical Manufacturers

Association six months before his article appeared.

On the heels of Safe's editorial, the Journal ran a book review panning

Steingraber's Living Downstream. The author, a physician identified

only as Jerry H. Berke, said Steingraber was obsessed with environmental

pollution as the cause of cancer. Berke, it turned out, was a senior

official at W. R. Grace, the chemical giant forced by the EPA to help pay for

a $69 million cleanup of contaminated wells in Woburn, Massachusetts, the

setting for the book and movie A Civil Action.

These events had one positive outcome, says Steingraber: they revived an

important public conversation that Carson, the anti-toxics pioneer,

initiated toward the end of her life. " She was beginning to document the

interlocking structures of industry and medicine and how the chemical

industry may be using the medical literature as a mouthpiece for its own

views. "

Carson, herself a victim of industry attacks, saw no contradiction between

preventing cancer and developing better treatments. But a " search for the

cure, " she said, misrepresents the slow nature of scientific discovery. As we

single-mindedly chase that elusive cure, we miss opportunities to

prevent the cancers of the next generation. " It is a disservice to humanity

to hold out the hope that the solution will come suddenly, in a single master

stroke, " she warned in Silent Spring.

Carson was dying of breast cancer when she wrote these words. No less tragic,

the pattern of missed opportunities continues more than 35 years later.

PROTECTING OUR HEALTH

What You Can Do to Reduce Toxics

Toxics activists in Sierra Club chapters and groups nationwide are working on

two major campaigns to protect public health. In a global effort, the Club

has joined the International POPs Elimination Network, an alliance of 100

non-governmental organizations advocating a worldwide ban of at least

12 persistent organic pollutants (POPs), the most hazardous chemicals known

to science. All of these " dirty dozen " chemicals are organochlorines that can

travel thousands of miles through the atmosphere, linger in the environment,

and concentrate in the fatty tissues of wildlife and humans.

For more information, contact of the Environmental Quality

Strategy team at aztoxic@...

And in the United States, the Club has teamed up with Health Care Without

Harm, a coalition of more than 170 groups dedicated to environmentally

responsible health care. The campaign focuses on reducing the toxic output of

medical incinerators-the leading source of mercury emissions and

second-leading source of dioxin. For more information, contact Doris

Cellarius, HCWH coordinator, at doris.cellarius@... -Liza Gross

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More Resources on breast cancer research and treatment.

Sharon Batt, a breast cancer survivor, is the author of Patient No More: The

Politics of Breast Cancer. Liza Gross is Sierra's copy editor.

© 2000 Sierra Club. Reproduction of this article is not permitted without

permission. Contact sierra.magazine@... for more information.