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 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.
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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.
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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.
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"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.
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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.
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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
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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.
