Beware: Breast Cancer Awareness Month turns breast cancer into just another marketing campaign.
Post by Susie.
October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month and I’d like to add my two cents to the discussion: I am a breast cancer survivor and I boycott Breast Cancer Awareness Month.
Rather than jumping on the very popular pink bandwagon, I boycott all breast cancer “awareness” and pink ribbon campaigns, subscribing to a CAUSE not CURE approach to the epidemic of breast cancer.
My highly critical view of Breast Cancer Awareness Month is along the lines of Samantha King’s, who, in her book Pink Ribbons, Inc., “traces how breast cancer has been transformed from a stigmatized disease and individual tragedy to a market-driven industry of survivorship.” King maintains that corporations, under the guise of philanthropy, “turn their formidable promotion machines on the curing of the disease while dwarfing public health prevention efforts and stifling the calls for investigation into why and how breast cancer affects such a vast number of people.” I couldn’t agree more.
I fully support Breast Cancer Action, an organization based in San Francisco helping to transform breast cancer from a private medical crisis to a public health emergency. And I love their Think Before You Pink campaign that “calls for more transparency and accountability by companies that take part in breast cancer fundraising, and encourages consumers to ask critical questions about pink ribbon promotions.” Think Before You Pink also highlights “pinkwashers”—companies that “purport to care about breast cancer by promoting a pink ribbon campaign, but manufacture products that are linked to the disease.”
In the spirit of focusing on CAUSE not CURE, Rita Arditti at CommonDreams.org writes about “Why Cancer’s Gaining on Us,” making the case about the rise in breast cancer coinciding with the flood of synthetic chemicals in our environment since the 1950s, calling for research into any possible links.
“Is there definitive evidence that these substances cause breast cancer?” she asks. “Have they been sufficiently studied? Well, no. We need to know more about the timing, duration, and patterns of exposure, which may be as important as dosage.”
Don’t miss that the chemicals she lists as examples are some of the very same chemicals to which those of us with Multiple Chemical Sensitivity react negatively.
Since World War II, the proliferation of synthetic chemicals has gone hand-in-hand with the increased incidence of breast cancer. About 80,000 synthetic chemicals are used today in the United States, and their number increases by about 1,000 each year. Only about 7 percent of them have been screened for their health effects. These chemicals can persist in the environment and accumulate in our bodies. According to a recent review by the Silent Spring Institute in Newton, 216 chemicals and radiation sources cause breast cancer in animals.
Nearly all of the chemicals cause mutations, and most cause tumors in multiple organs and animal species, findings that are generally believed to indicate they likely cause cancer in humans. Yet few have been closely studied by regulatory bodies. There is concern about benzene, which is in gasoline; polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, which are in air pollution from vehicle exhaust, tobacco smoke, and charred foods; ethylene oxide, which is widely used in medical settings; and methylene chloride, a common solvent in paint strippers and glues.
That’s where we should be focusing, not on the pretty ribbon in a feel-good color that pops up on the calendar once a year and is sponsored by the pharmaceutical and cosmetic industries.
Photo credit. Metastatic cancer cells.
This post was originally published in October 2008.
If you enjoyed this post, please read these related stories:
