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

By |

• 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.