Also see: A World Awash In Hormones and The HRT Debacle & Minimizing Menopause - My Magic Salad
Breast Cancer
Money-Go-Round: Pharmaceuticals, Pesticides, and Radiation Cause
Breast Cancer, While Wealthy Non-Profits and
Feds Protect Industry
by Lynn Landes 10/23/02
They’re good girls and boys. Racing for the cure. Crying for the cameras.
Sharing their pain. Wearing that crown of thorns like a halo. Nice folks. And
aren't they "better people" for just having "survived"
breast cancer?
Or...are they being played for suckers? Conned by a clever marketing strategy
that makes heroes out of victims, and saints out of sinners. Racing for the
cure, but running from the cause.
Most of the well-financed breast cancer organizations make little or no mention
of the non-genetic causes of breast cancer. Go to their websites. Read their
literature. These organizations don't focus on the environmental and pharmacological
causes of this epidemic because it's a dank dark alley that leads right to their
corporate sponsors.
"National
Breast Cancer Awareness Month was established by Zeneca, a bioscience company
with sales of $8.62 billion in 1997. Forty-nine percent of Zeneca's 1997 profits
came from pesticides and other industrial chemicals, and 49% were from
pharmaceutical sales, one-third (about $1.4 billion's worth) of which were
cancer treatment drugs," says the Green Guide, a publication of Mothers
& Others for a Livable Planet.
Zeneca also makes Tamoxifen, "a known carcinogen" according to the
National Institutes of Health (NIH). After only a few years of exposure,
Tamoxifen can actually cause breast cancer, says a 1999 study from Duke
University. "There is strong evidence of Tamoxifen’s toxicity, including
high risks of uterine, gastrointestinal and fatal liver cancer," reports
The Cancer Information Network, adding, "The Breast Cancer Prevention Trial
(BCPT) conducted by the National Surgical Adjuvant Breast and Bowel Project
(NSABP) "found that women taking Tamoxifen had more than twice the chance
of developing uterine cancer compared with women on placebo."
General
Electric is a huge global conglomerate that provides all kinds of products and
services. GE also owns health clinics that use GE equipment that can expose
patients to different types of radiation. GE makes ultrasound, magnetic
resonance imaging (MRI), and mammography machines - a known cause of breast
cancer in younger women. In addition, there are 91 nuclear power plants based on
the GE design operating in 11 countries," says GE on its website. Nuclear
power plants are a known source of radiation leakage.
Radiation
is a "complete carcinogen" says Dr. Peter Montegue, in his 1997 5-part
series, "The Truth About Breast Cancer." Montegue writes, "Very
few things have the ability to initiate cancer AND promote it AND make it
progress. Things that can do this are called "complete carcinogens."
By analyzing 50 years of U.S. National Cancer Institute data, Dr. Jay Gould,
director of the Radiation and Public Health Project, Inc., says, "of the
3,000-odd counties in the United States, women living in about 1,300 nuclear
counties (located within 100 miles of a reactor) are at the greatest risk of
dying of breast cancer." GE
is also a contributor to many efforts to "battle" breast cancer.
Other
corporations, such as Rhone-Poulec, Rohm & Hass, Eli Lilly Novartis,
American Cyanamid, and Dupont, have also profiteered from both sides of
this manufactured epidemic.
In
addition to these duplicitous industries and their heavily financed non-profit
partners-in-deception, is the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Its cozy
relationship to (and increasing financial reliance on) business and industry
through organizations like the Centers for Disease Control Foundation, is a
blatant conflict of interest. Not surprisingly, the NIH website for breast
cancer research is very similar to research funded by the top breast cancer
organizations... it's all about detection, cures, and genetics. Of the 14 areas
of research listed, only 2 studies relate to the links between breast cancer and
non-genetic influences. And those studies dismiss the notion of any
connection.
The NIH studies are grossly misleading.
On June 26, 2002, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC, part of NIH) issued a
news release that said, "Study Finds No Association Between Oral Contraceptive
Use and Breast Cancer For Women 35 and Over." Actually the study did not
include women older than 65 or younger than 35, which begs the question,
"Why not?" What also makes this study hard to swallow are the results
of the study on Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) two weeks later. On July 9,
2002 (and after more than forty years of widespread use) the NIH announced that HRT
(low dose estrogen plus progestin), can cause an increase in heart attacks,
strokes, blood clots, and ...breast cancer.
So, are we to believe that the low dose estrogen-progestin combination is okay
for contraception, but not for menopause?
Actually, there was no difference between the outcome of those two studies, admitted Dr. Bob Spirtas, of the National Institute of Child Health and Development (part of NIH), in a conversation with this writer. A woman's risk for breast cancer is 16% higher at the time she is taking oral contraceptives or HRT and for five years after she stops, at which point the risk is 3% or "statistically insignificant," said Dr. Spirtas.
Well,
that certainly wasn't the message conveyed by the NIH, which seemed to give oral
contraceptives a clean bill of health.
The NIH has also come to the rescue of the chemical industry. On May 15, 2001,
the NIH announced, "DDT, PCBs Not Linked to Higher Rates of Breast Cancer,
an Analysis of Five Northeast Studies Concludes." However, the highly
regarded authors of OurStolenFuture.com point out that most studies are flawed,
"The problem is that DDE and the commonly-studied most persistent PCBs act
as an anti-androgen and anti-estrogens, respectively, not estrogens. Findings
that indicate these contaminants are not associated with breast cancer risk are
completely irrelevant to the hypothesis that xenoestrogens may induce breast
cancer."
It's pretty clear. We're firing blanks in this "war against breast
cancer." While industries release toxic chemicals, unsafe drugs, and
radiation, they also fund government agencies and large non-profits who provide
effective "cover" for their devastating activities.
I call
it the Breast Cancer Money-Go-Round.
Links:
Lynn Landes is the publisher of EcoTalk.org and a news reporter for DUTV in Philadelphia, PA. Formerly Lynn was a radio show host for WDVR in New Jersey and a regular commentator for a BBC radio program. She can be reached at (215) 629-3553 / lynnlandes@earthlink.net.
