Culture

SIDEBAR: Breast Cancer Risk Factors

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• Part One: Cause & Controversy
• Part Two: A Plague of Neglect
• Sidebars: Risk Factors; Toxic Links; Long Island
• Printable: Download the magazine-style PDF

What causes breast cancer? Who’s at risk, and why? These seem like simple questions. But the answers remain vexingly elusive. Talk to any credible researcher and you’ll come up with a list of risk factors that can be counted on one hand — indicating not only the extent of our knowledge, but also our lack of it.

Science

SIDEBAR: Breast Cancer: Toxic Links

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• Part One: Cause & Controversy
• Part Two: A Plague of Neglect
• Sidebars: Risk Factors; Toxic Links; Long Island
• Printable: Download the magazine-style PDF

No one is going to deny the cancer-causing potential of industrial, agricultural and consumer chemicals. What’s at issue is actual human risk from exposure to these chemicals in our daily environment. And even if a chemical or substance has been proven to be harmful, there’s no guarantee that a legislative body or regulatory agency will severely limit or ban its use. Consider the ongoing national debate over the sale and use of tobacco. “You have industries saying, ‘we can’t afford to meet this regulation and it’ll put us out of business, you have to be a little bit more lax,'” said Allan Hirsch, spokesman for the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA) in California.

Science

SIDEBAR: The Lessons of Long Island

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• Part One: Cause & Controversy
• Part Two: A Plague of Neglect
• Sidebars: Risk Factors; Toxic Links; Long Island
• Printable: Download the magazine-style PDF

Founded at the behest of Congress in 1993, the Long Island Breast Cancer Study Project (nih.gov) was intended to deliver the definitive statement on environmental contaminants and high breast cancer rates — exactly the sort of thing being demanded now in the Bay Area. The study grew to encompass 10 projects (nih.gov), adding up to more than $26 million in special grants and various local and federal agencies. Missing links

“I think this process will ultimately disclose the environmental links to cancer,” said Karen Joy Miller, founder and president of Long Island’s 4,000-member Huntington Breast Cancer Action Coalition. She already has her suspicions that it will prove to be “many things in combination, what we drink and what we breathe, things we use for our manicured lawns, our pesticides, our household cleaners … We are doing it to ourselves.”

Culture

For Blacks, Breast Cancer is a Plague of Neglect

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• Part One: Cause & Controversy
• Part Two: A Plague of Neglect
• Sidebars: Risk Factors; Toxic Links; Long Island
• Printable: Download the magazine-style PDF

By Carl Hall, special to Newsdesk.org

Dr. Judith Luce, head of the community breast cancer treatment center at San Francisco General Hospital, took a rare break one recent spring day from one of the busiest caseloads in Bay Area health care. She spent a full hour outlining what she considers to be the real Bay Area cancer nightmare. It’s not about Marin, Luce said, it’s about women in areas such as predominantly African-American, low-income Bayview/Hunters Point (Yahoo map) in San Francisco. The San Francisco neighborhood is perhaps best known for the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, where residents suspect decades of miscellaneous dumping of cleaning chemicals, industrial solvents and other toxins nobody has fully cataloged. Cancer Cluster?

Culture

Breast Cancer’s Cause & Controversy

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• Part One: Cause & Controversy
• Part Two: A Plague of Neglect
• Sidebars: Risk Factors; Toxic Links; Long Island
• Printable: Download the magazine-style PDF

By Carl Hall, special to Newsdesk.org

For Nancy Rubin, director of the Marin County Department of Health and Human Services, it’s high time for some answers. “I am taking this really seriously because my community is taking it really seriously,” she said. “I have a responsibility to the community. Pure and simple.” Her community — the overwhelmingly white, well-to-do population (marin.org/) of Marin County — is rallying against what they perceive as a nationwide epidemic of breast cancer, one that is crashing down hardest on that idyllic stretch of forested countryside just north of the Golden Gate Bridge.