There are something like 80,000 chemicals not found in nature that are in commercial use in the United States. Of these, the Environmental Protection Agency has developed estimates of the toxicity for only a tiny fraction of them. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration requires medical surveillance of workers exposed to only 11 of them.
Yesterday, the Los Angeles Times carried news with the headline “Common chemicals are linked to breast cancer.” Three studies published in the online edition of the journal Cancer, a publication of the National Cancer Institute, were the subject of the Times article. The studies were not original research but were instead reviews of the science available on the association between breast cancer and chemicals and nutrition.
One of the studies found only 152 instances of research on the association of chemicals to breast cancer. In contrast, the study of nutrition found over 1,500 instances of research. In evaluating the 152 studies of 216 separate chemicals and breast cancer, the researchers found a strong and consistent association. The diet research, on the other hand, found none.
Let me caution here, as the researchers do, that this doesn’t prove conclusively that, for example, a common solvent like methylene chloride, causes breast cancer. What these studies show is that a great deal of time and money has been thrown at the relationship between women’s diets and breast cancer whereas the effect of those 80,000 chemicals has received crumbs. The cancer establishment as well as the EPA and OSHA should be ashamed.
You might think that the cancer establishment is finally waking up to the dangers of our chemical-laden world. You’d be wrong.
The funding for these studies came from a private foundation called Susan G. Komen for the Cure whose website is komen.org, an organization dedicated to breast cancer activism. The research was not conducted through the National Cancer Institute but by researchers at the Silent Spring Institute whose website is silentspring.org where copies of the articles are available. A database of the studies as well as a database of the chemicals is also available on their website.
As I mentioned, these studies don’t prove conclusively that methylene chloride or any of the other 216 chemicals that have been studied cause breast cancer. It also says nothing about the remaining 79,784 chemicals that haven’t been studied at all. What I want to know is why we have to prove, conclusively or otherwise, that any of these chemicals cause cancer or any other kind of biological mischief? Why don’t manufacturers of methylene chloride have to prove that it doesn’t cause harm?
Before you stand and cheer for the precautionary principle I’ll note that you and I are in the same boat with the chemical manufacturers. Air pollution from burning fossil fuels includes polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, which are associated with breast cancer. Then there’s PCBs, polychlorinated biphenols that haven’t been produced in years, yet they’re still floating around and winding up in body fat and breast milk. PCBs are also associated with breast cancer.
It sounds overwhelming and guilt-ridden. But the situation is neither. It simply calls for doing what you are able to do using your own best judgment. Information is available at the websites I mentioned as well as at our website.
