What Causes Breast Cancer?
by
Peter Montague
Breast
cancer kills 46,000 women in the U.S. each year. On average, each of
these women has her life cut short by 20 years, for a total loss of
about a million person-years of productive life each year. Of course
this huge cost to society is heaped on even greater burdens, the personal
anguish and suffering, the motherless children, the shattered families.
The medical
establishment dominated by male doctors pretends that the breast cancer
epidemic will one day be reversed by some miracle cure, which we have
now been promised for 50 years. Until that miracle arrives, we are told,
there is nothing to be done except slice off women's breasts, pump their
bodies full of toxic chemicals to kill cancer cells, burn them with
radiation, and bury our dead. Meanwhile, the normal public health approach
primary prevention languishes without mention and without funding. We
know what causes the vast majority of cancers: exposure to carcinogens.
What would a normal public health approach entail? Reduce the burden
of cancer by reducing our exposure to carcinogens. One key idea has
defined public health for more than 100 years: PREVENTION. But with
cancer, everything is different. In the case of cancer, prevention has
been banished from polite discussion.
Now a new,
fully-documented book[1], by physician Janette D. Sherman, poses a fundamental
challenge to all the doctors and researchers and health bureaucrats
who have turned their backs on cancer prevention: "If cancers are
not caused by chemicals, endocrine-disrupting chemicals, and ionizing
radiation, what are the causes? How else can one explain the doubling,
since 1940, of a woman's likelihood of developing breast cancer, increasing
in tandem with prostate and childhood cancers?," Dr. Sherman asks.(pg.
x) And if exposures are the problem, then ending exposures is the solution:
"Actual prevention means eliminating factors that cause cancer
in the first place."(pg. 31)
Dr. Sherman
is a practicing physician who has treated 8000 patients over 30 years.
Unlike most physicians, she possesses an extensive knowledge of chemistry.
Furthermore, she has become a historian by examining a large body of
medical and public health literature dating back to the 19th century.
It is this unique combination -- of historical view, knowledge of chemistry,
deep personal experience as a physician, and an ethical clarity that
PRIMARY PREVENTION is the proper policy -- that makes this book important
and compelling.
The book begins
with two chapters emphasizing the similarities among all living things
that are made up of cells including humans, animals and plants. Cells
in every creature can go awry and start to grow uncontrollably, a definition
of cancer. Because all cell-based creatures are so similar, what we
learn from one can often tell us something useful about another. For
example, when we learn from the Smithsonian Institution that sharks
get cancer from swimming in waters contaminated with industrial chemicals,
we learn (or SHOULD learn) something useful about our own vulnerability
to exotic chemicals.(pg. 9)
Turning to
breast cancer, Dr. Sherman lists the known "risk factors"
the common characteristics shared by many women who get breast cancer:
early menarche (age at which menstruation begins); late menopause (age
at which menstruation ends); late childbirth and the birth of few or
no children; no experience breast-feeding; obesity; high fat diet; being
tall; having cancer of the ovaries or uterus; use of oral contraceptives;
excessive use of alcohol.
"What
is the message running through all of these 'risks?'" Dr. Sherman
asks. "Hormones, hormones, and hormones. Hormones of the wrong
kind, hormones too soon in a girl's life, hormones for too many years
in a woman's life, too many chemicals with hormonal action, and too
great a total hormonal load."(pg. 20)
Dr. Sherman
then turns her focus to the one fully-established cause of breast (and
other) cancers: ionizing radiation, from x-rays, and from nuclear power
plant emissions and the radioactive fallout from A-bomb tests.
These, then,
are the environmental factors that give rise to breast cancer: exposures
to cancer-causing chemicals, to hormonally-active chemicals, and to
ionizing radiation in air, food and water. How do we know the environment
air, food, water and ionizing radiation plays an important role in causing
breast cancer? Because when Asian women move from their homelands to
the U.S., their breast cancer rate soars. There is something in the
environment of the U.S. (and other western industrial countries) causing
an epidemic of this hormone-related disease. The medical research establishment
likes to call it "lifestyle factors" but it's really environment.
Air, food, water, ionizing radiation.
With this basic
information in hand, Dr. Sherman then describes historically and today
the exposure of women in the U.S. to a flood of carcinogenic and hormonally
active chemicals, plus ionizing radiation.
Take common
pharmaceutical products, for example. Canadian researchers have demonstrated
enhanced cancer growth in mice given daily HUMAN-EQUIVALENT doses of
three commonly-used antihistamines, which are sold under the trade names
Claritin, Histamil and Atarax.(pg. 21) Two years earlier the same researchers
had reported breast cancer promotion in rodents fed clinically-relevant
doses of antidepressant drugs, which are marketed as Elavil and Prozac.(pg.
21) Millions of women in the U.S. are taking these drugs today.
At least 5
million women in the U.S. are currently taking Premarin the most often-prescribed
form of estrogen (female sex hormone), to ease the transition through
menopause.(pg. 156) This is called "hormone replacement therapy"
and it is routine, recommended medical practice in the U.S. A review
of 51 studies of women taking hormone replacement therapy showed that
those who never took hormones had a breast cancer rate ranging from
18 to 63 per 1000 women. Those who took hormones for five years experienced
an additional 2 breast cancers per 1000 women; after 10 years of hormone
therapy the additional breast cancers rose to 6 per 1000. The danger
largely disappears 5 years after discontinuing use.
Hormones are
big business. Despite evidence that synthetic hormones caused cancer
in rodents and rabbits, American drug companies began selling synthetic
hormones in 1934 in cosmetics, drugs, food additives, and animal feed.
The best-known is DES (diethylstilbestrol) but there were and still
are many others. The National Cancer Institute (NCI) in 1938 published
a study showing that DES caused breast cancer in rodents. Three years
later, in 1941, NCI published a second study confirming that DES caused
breast cancer in rodents. That year the U.S. Food and Drug Administration
(FDA) approved DES for commercial use in women.(pg. 91)
DES is 400
times as potent as natural estrogen and can be made for pennies per
pill. It was therefore phenomenally profitable and researchers aggressively
sought new uses. DES soon was being used to prevent miscarriages, as
a "morning after" pill to prevent pregnancies, and as a breast-enlargement
cream. It wasn't long before researchers discovered that they could
make chickens, cows and pigs grow faster if they fed them hormones,
and a huge new market for hormones opened up. As early as 1947, a hormonal
effect was reported among U.S. women who ate chicken treated with growth
hormones. (Chapter 7, note 55.) Between 1954 and 1973 three quarters
of all beef cattle slaughtered in the U.S. grew fat on DES.
In 1971, human
cancer from DES exposure was confirmed and in 1973 DES was banned from
meat, so other growth hormones were substituted. Most recently, of course,
the U.S. FDA has allowed the U.S. milk supply to be modified to increase
the levels of a growth hormone (called IGF-1) known to stimulate growth
of breast cells in women. (pg. 101)
Still today
most U.S. beef, chickens and pigs are intentionally contaminated with
growth hormones which is why Europeans refuse to allow the import of
U.S. beef. European scientists are asking the same question that Dr.
Sherman raises: "[H]ormones are administered to meat animals to
promote growth and weight gain. Why should humans expect to not respond
similarly to such chemical stimuli?"(pgs. 16-17)
Then of course
there are dozens probably, in fact, hundreds of household chemicals
and industrial byproducts that are hormonally active: pesticides, cleansers,
solvents, plasticizers, surfactants, dyes, cosmetics, PCBs, dioxins,
and so forth, that interfere with, or mimic, naturally-occurring hormones.
We are awash in these, at low levels, from conception until death. See
www.ourstolenfuture.org.
How many growth-stimulating
and cancer-promoting hormones can we ingest or absorb through our lungs
and skin before we feel the effects? No one in authority is asking that
crucial question, but Janette Sherman is asking it, pointedly, and armed
to the teeth with scientific evidence.
Then there
is radioactivity. In 1984, a study of Mormon families in Utah downwind
from the nuclear tests in Nevada reported elevated numbers of breast
cancers.(pg. 65) Girls who survived the bombing of Hiroshima are now
dying in excessive numbers from breast cancer. Dr. John Gofman has reviewed
22 separate studies confirming unequivocally that exposure to ionizing
radiation causes breast cancer. (See REHN #693.) Janette Sherman does
a good job of summarizing ecological studies showing that women living
near nuclear power plants suffer from elevated numbers of breast cancers.
These studies, by their nature, are suggestive and not conclusive. but
there is ample reason to believe that all nuclear power plants leak
radioactivity routinely into local air and water and that any exposure
to ionizing radiation increases a woman's danger of breast cancer. The
only way to PREVENT this problem is to end nuclear power permanently.
Why has the
U.S. turned its back on the preventive approach to cancer? Dr. Sherman
returns to this question throughout her book. For example, in a devastating
chapter on Tamoxifen (a known cancer-causing chemical now approved by
U.S. FDA for use in women), she asks, "Why is our primary well-funded
National Cancer Institute not devoting its efforts to primary prevention?
Has breast cancer, like so many aspects of our culture, become just
another business opportunity?"(pg. 149)
In the end,
Dr. Sherman reaches a conclusion about that question: "There is
a massing, in a few hands, of the control of production, distribution
and use of pharmaceutical drugs and appliances; control of the sale
and use of medical and laboratory tests; the consolidation and control
of hospitals, nursing homes, and home care providers. We are no longer
people who become sick. We have become markets. Is it any wonder that
prevention receives so little attention? Cancer is a big and successful
business!" (pg. 207)
And, finally:
"Reflecting on the purpose of the corporation to sell products
and services and maximize profits, it becomes apparent that prevention
cannot be in the interest of the bottom line. What a sad and bitter
realization," she concludes.(pg. 228)
Despite this
sad and bitter conclusion, this is a powerful upbeat book about what
citizens can and must do to end the epidemic of cancer that is sweeping
the western world. If the truth shall set us free, this book is an important
part of our collective liberation, freeing us from the lies and deceptions,
the false promises of cancer cures always "just around the corner."
Cancer is caused by exposure to carcinogens. The way to solve the cancer
problem is to prevent exposures. This means we must end nuclear power,
and demand clean food, water and air. Janette Sherman's contribution
has been to give us a wealth of powerful evidence on which to act. Now
it is up to us.
[1]
Janette D. Sherman, LIFE'S DELICATE BALANCE; THE CAUSES AND PREVENTION
OF BREAST CANCER (New York and London: Taylor and Francis, 2000). ISBN
1-56032-870-3.
http://www.Rachel.org