Breast Cancer and the Environment - The Chlorine Connection
by Megan Williams

The worldwide increase in breast cancer rates has occurred during the same period in which the global environment has become contaminated with industrial synthetic chemicals, including the toxic and persistent "organochlorines."

In an auditorium at the University of Illinois, a conference of health workers, scientists, environmentalists and women with breast cancer listen with rapt attention to a most unusual development.

This gathering of formerly unacquainted experts has come to bear witness to the emergence of a new paradigm--one that is attempting to define breast cancer as a consequence of political-economic decisions rather than of random tragedy or individual lifestyle choices.

The conference's centerpiece is a new study released by Greenpeace which argues that chlorine-based compounds--that basis of plastics, pesticides, and paper bleaching--make a significant contribution to malignant tumors in the breast.

"In spite of decades of research and millions of dollars spent, the cancer establishment remains myopically fixated on obsolete, blame-the -victim theories of breast cancer causations, while ignoring growing evidence of the role of environmental contaminants," Samuel Epstein, author of "The Politics of Cancer" and an epidemiologist with the University of Illinois Medical Center, tells the meeting.

And he says that in order for his theories to be heard, he has to overcome the resistances of the medical profession, cancer agencies, pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies too set in their ways to see the writing on the wall.

Current statistics predict that an alarming one in eight women in North America will contract the disease. This makes it the leading cause of death in women between ages 40 and 55. Since 1950, breast cancer rates have risen from one in twenty to today's rate of one in eight.

"The worldwide increase in breast cancer rates has occurred during the same period in which the global environment has become contaminated with industrial synthetic chemicals, including the toxic and persistent organochlorines," state the Greenpeace report, "Breast Cancer And The Environment: The Chlorine Connection."

Organochlorines, first produced in the early 1900's, have been made on a large scale since the second world war, when they were used as poison gases. They include DDT, PCBs, dioxin, Agent Orange and thousands of lesser-known chemical products and byproducts. Each year in North America, 13 million tons of chlorine are produced, Greenpeace reports. Only 1 percent is used to chlorinate drinking water--the rest is employed in the production of plastics and to bleach paper.

The report comes to the striking conclusion that there is evidence that women with breast cancer "tend to have higher levels of organochlorines in the tissues than women without breast cancer."

A recent study carried out in Hartford, Connecticut--the first of its kind in North America--found women with breast cancer to have 50-to 60-percent higher levels of organochlorines, including PCBs, in their breast tissue than women without breast cancer, the report explains.

Experts say organochlorines are lipophilic-or attracted to fatty tissue.

Mary Wolff, an epidemiologist at the Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York, who led the study says the results surprised even her.

"This is the first new evidence that could be a clue about the rising breast cancer rates," she says. "I've personally been a skeptic all along about the environmental connections, but I keep being proven wrong."

She says that due to the nature of epidemiology--the study of causes of disease--researchers have to be extremely careful in not equating circumstantial evidence with causes. Because of this, she says, epidemiologists sometimes run the risk of becoming limited by their own profession.

Similar findings to Wolff's study surfaced in a recent Finnish study. A group of 44 women with breast cancer were found to have significantly higher concentrations of the pesticide b-HCH in their breast fat than a set of 33 women without breast cancer. The findings of these two studies confirm similar results by Israeli researchers, the Greenpeace report says.

The report also cites Israel's decline in breast cancer rates over the last decade as the probably result of an aggressive program to phase out organochlorine pesticides. From 1951 to 1976, Israeli levels of organochlorine pesticides in cow's milk, human milk and human tissues were among the highest in the world, anywhere from five to 800 times higher than U.S. levels.

When the pesticide phase-out began, breast cancer rates in that country dropped by 8 percent over the first 10 years- a stark contrast to the rising rates in other industrialized nations. The authors of the study examined all other known risk factors and concluded that each of them following 1976 had actually increased.

Jay Palter, a chlorine issues campaigner at Greenpeace Toronto, says Greenpeace would like to see organochlorines phased out or "sunset" as a class.

"This class of toxins behave in an extremely dangerous way," he says. Research has found that individual compounds can't be singled out as the sole cause of cancers, that in fact it's a combination of these toxins that's so dangerous. That's why it's essential to target them as a class, rather than regulating individual chemicals.

In its own reports, the National Cancer Institute acknowledges that the most frequently cited factors in causing breast cancer--heredity, age, a high-fat diet and hormonal changes in women (the early onset of a women's period, late onset menopause and late childbirth)--are attributable risk factors in less than 30 percent of cases. This was echoed in the Canadian House of Commons all-party subcommittee reports on breast cancer released this June.

As a point of comparison, experts say smoking is considered an attributable risk of 85 to 90 percent of lung cancer. Although heredity and hormonal changes may put some women at risk, studies linking a high-fat diet to breast cancer have been inconsistent and weak, the report says. The remaining 70 percent of cancers are unexplained. Epstein, who wrote the report's introduction, claims that the known factors have not altered in four decades and hence fail to account for the
sharp rise in breast cancer.

Spurred on by animal evidence, Howard Morrison, a scientist at the Laboratory for Disease Control at Health and Welfare Canada, and several other American and Israeli scientists are currently planning a study that will look at toxins and breast cancer.

"It's a very interesting hypothesis, and we're certainly going to pursue it, but to date the evidence has been limited. Historically, research has focused on diet and heredity, often because preexisting data is available. Researchers tend to gravitate to the safest areas of research because it's easier to get funded and your results published."

Wolff says it took her two years to find a publisher for her breast cancer study. It was rejected by top medical journals because, according to her, " the idea of pollutants being linked to breast cancer was so new, and not considered important enough."

But for the women who have had breast cancer and who have fought to put the issue in the public realm, the scarcity of research money seems morally outrageous.

Two years ago some of them formed the National Breast Cancer Coalition, based in Washington, D.C., in order to become a voice for women trying to find ways to understand their own illness and to provide grassroots advocacy in the war against breast cancer.

In less than two years, the NBCC has grown to more than 160 organizations representing several million patients, professionals, women, their families and friends. Through massive letter writing campaigns which delivered over 600,000 letters to Congress and the President, NBCC made members of Congress aware of the need to place breast cancer research funding and policy among their legislative priorities.

These kinds of efforts from breast cancer advocates have resulted in an appropriation of $132.7 million for breast cancer research at the National Cancer Institute in 1992, an almost 50 percent gain over the $90 million 1991 spending estimate. Of that $132.7 million, only $18.5 million was spent on prevention. This is an incredibly low figure considering the fact that breast cancer is over 15% of all cancers diagnosed each year.

Unfortunately, prevention of all cancers is apparently a low priority of the NCI--only 17% ($293 million) of the total budget was spent on primary prevention in 1991. Their prevention efforts focus mostly on research on the cellular mechanisms of cancer development, not actual prevention strategies.

Judith Brady, a San Francisco-based health worker who was diagnosed with the illness 12 years ago, says the movement that is taking up so much of her time now, owes much to AIDS activism. AIDS strategists, she says, have put the question of the right to a healthy life into the political arena. But there are differences.

"When AIDS sprang out of nowhere, it sprang into the gay community--a well-organized, highly educated, male and therefore wealthier, activist community. Women haven't pulled together enough on the breast cancer epidemic and we're up against a very powerful cancer establishment telling us every thing's okay," Brady says at the Chicago conference.

"We call it pollution. It's invisible violence," Brady quoted a friend who recently died from breast cancer. "We have to stop being nice girls and start fighting as if our lives depended on it , because they do."

Reprinted with permission from Toronto Now (11-26-92) via Alternet.
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