Healthy Skepticism Library item: 2601

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: news

Boseley S.
Authorities accused of failing to tackle causes of breast cancer
The Guardian ( UK) 2005 Sep 27
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,1579636,00.html

Keywords:
cancer breast

Notes:

Ralph Faggotter’s Comments: We are constantly told that a ‘cure for cancer’ is just around the corner. – But the incidence of cancer continues to rise rapidly.
Why is this?
Because, for every cancer treating chemical which industry comes up with, it comes up with dozens which increase the risk of cancer.
We unwittingly live our modern lives in this toxic soup. Even breast milk contains hundreds of artificial chemicals.
If a tiny fraction of the money which is spent on looking for a cure was spend on prevention, the death rate from cancer realy would eventually start to drop.
This is unlikely to happen as preventing disease is not seen as heroic.
If we ever reach the point where a TV series is made about a brillant epidemiologist/environmentalist rather than a surgeon, then we might have reached the point of cultural understanding where we can turn the tide on cancer.
Until then forget it.

Full text:

Authorities accused of failing to tackle causes of breast cancer

· Women ‘are sold myth that disease is normal’
· Campaign group flags possible link to pollution

Sarah Boseley, health editor
Wednesday September 28, 2005
The Guardian

The government and the “cancer establishment” are today accused of failing to tackle the causes of breast cancer, in a report that claims environmental pollutants have played a significant part in its epidemic rise.

The report, by an umbrella organisation called the UK Working Group on the Primary Prevention of Breast Cancer, pulls together evidence on what is known of the effect of gender-bending chemicals, carcinogens and toxins on animals and humans. While there is no proof of a direct link between chemical pollution and breast cancer, the report says there is cause for concern.
“We need a massive rethink of priorities,” said Diana Ward of the small charity Breast Cancer UK, the principal author of the report, which was funded by the European Public Health Alliance Environment Network, Unison, the Co-Op Bank and the Scottish Breast Cancer Campaign. “Government and the cancer establishment promote treatment and control and call this prevention. It’s a travesty of the meaning of the word.”

“I think they are flagging up an area that in other countries is being addressed much more seriously,” said Professor Andrew Watterson, head of the occupational and environmental research group at the University of Stirling. “US toxicologists are very concerned about this.

“There is some evidence about the contraceptive pill having caused a problem, albeit a small one, but it is one of those areas where we have people saying there isn’t a problem when there isn’t evidence that that is the case.”

Breast cancer numbers have steadily risen since the middle of the last century. In 1996, one woman in 12 was expected to get breast cancer in her lifetime, but within five years the figure was one in nine, the report points out.

Cancer specialists predict a further rise and talk of breast cancer as a disease women will have to learn to live with, like diabetes.

“Women have been sold the myth that breast cancer is normal and inevitable. It’s not,” Ms Ward said. “Breast cancer is preventable, but government and the cancer industry determinedly ignore the evidence.”

The report’s thesis is controversial. Research into the causes of breast cancer has only managed to pinpoint a handful of factors. They include the tendency for women to have their first child later in life, not to have many children and not to breastfeed. Also implicated are the earlier age at which girls start to have their periods, and genes, although only in a small minority of cases. Rates have also risen because women live longer, and because of population screening which finds cancers that might have gone undetected in the past.

The report points out that 350 human-made chemicals have been found in breast milk. Fatty tissue tends to store toxins. An analysis of blood from the umbilical cords of babies, carried out by WWF and Greenpeace this month, found that babies are born with a large number of chemicals in their bodies.

Some of the chemicals used in plastics, detergents and pesticides are endocrine disruptors – they mimic natural hormones such as oestrogen. Many breast tumours are oestrogen-dependent and can be treated by drugs which reduce the amount of oestrogen in the body.

Vyvyan Howard, a toxico-pathologist at the University of Liverpool, who is quoted in the report, agrees that the evidence is circumstantial, but says there are “strands of information” that suggest low doses of chemicals could be having an effect on the development of the human body. It is hard to assess the impact of environmental pollution on our bodies.

“We have got the introduction into the environment and into our bodies of tens of thousands of very complex chemicals,” he said. “We have no tools for analysing a mixture of this complexity.”

But it made sense to try to work towards prevention of possible ill-effects. “We need to be addressing the preventative side and trying to get the breast cancer rates down to where they were.”

The Department of Health said the causes of breast cancer were complex. “The World Health Organisation’s international programme on chemical safety concluded in 2002 that there is no direct evidence that environmental chemicals (endocrine disruptors) are a cause of breast cancer,” it said in a statement.