Diseases as enviro indicators OVER THE course of one brief century, the 20th, humankind has seriously, and perhaps irreversibly, altered our global environment. Among the changes made, tens of thousands of synthetic chemicals have been pumped into the environment. And artificial radiation across the electronic spectrum has become a part of the landscape. One negative consequence of the new, man-made environment is diseases caused by exposure to artificial agents in the environment. One such disease may be breast cancer. A paper passed on to me by Franklin McDonald, the executive director of the National Environmental and Planning Agency from the Environmental Research Foundation in the United States, makes a strong case for the claim. Breast cancer causes the death of 46,000 women in the United States and ranks only behind cervical cancer among women in Jamaica. The incidence of the disease has doubled since 1940. World War II marks the explosion of petroleum-based synthetics in the human environment. The paper is actually a review of a book by a physician, Janette Sherman, Life's Delicate Balance: The Causes and Prevention of Breast Cancer. Dr. Sherman is a physician who has treated thousands of such patients over 30 years. She possesses an extensive knowledge of environmental chemistry, and 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 combination of historical view, knowledge of chemistry, deep personal experience as a physician, and an ethical position that prevention is the proper response to the epidemic of breast cancer that underpins the book. The known risk factors, the common characteristics shared by many women who get breast cancer are: 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. The message running through all these risks, Dr. Sherman says, is, "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." A great many synthetic chemicals mimic hormones in humans and animals because of similar chemical structures. Not only that, after it was discovered that antibiotics and hormones in animal feed made the animals grow faster, it became routine practice to add these substances to feeds. Writing in Newsweek on January 22, Henrick Wegener, a research professor at the Zoonosis centre in Copenhagen, Denmark, said, "back in the 1950s the livestock industry, searching for cheap alternatives to grains, began putting waste from the pharmaceutical industry into animal feed. When they used byproducts from antibiotics production, their animal grew bigger. They didn't know why, but it seemed like a good thing, so the practice caught on". Now, for every ounce of antibiotics a doctor dispenses for a patient in the United States, livestock producers give eight to animals. Danish livestock, says professor Wegener, consume five times as much antibiotics as Danish citizens. Two consequences of this massive reliance on antibiotics in livestock farming, which is done in this country as well, are the introduction of second-hand antibiotics into human food and growing bacterial resistance to antibiotics. Dr. Sherman's data is impressive. 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 US, their breast cancer rate soars. There is something in the environment of western industrial countries causing an epidemic of this hormone-related disease. The male-dominated medical research establishment likes to call it 'lifestyle factors' but it is really environment air, food, water, ionizing radiation. Canadian researchers have demonstrated enhanced cancer growth in mice given daily human-equivalent doses of three commonly used antihistamines. The same researchers have reported breast cancer promotion in mice which were given doses of antidepressant drugs at human clinical levels. 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 two breast cancers per 1000 women. After 10 years of hormone therapy the additional breast cancers rose by 6 more per 1000. Hormones are big business, the paper notes: "Despite evidence that synthetic hormones caused cancer in rodents and rabbits, American drug companies began selling synthetic hormones back in 1934 in cosmetics, drugs, food additives, and animal feed. The best known is DES (diethylstilbestrol)." 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 same year the USFDA approved DES for commercial use. DES is 400 times as potent as natural estrogen and can be made quite cheaply. It was therefore enormously profitable and researchers pushed new uses for the product. 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 livestock 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 US women who ate chicken treated with growth hormones. Between 1954 and 1973, when DES was banned, three-quarters of all beef cattle slaughtered in the US grew fat on the hormone. Janette Sherman also takes on ionizing radiation as a cause of breast cancer. In 1984, a study of Mormon families in Utah downwind from the nuclear tests in Nevada reported elevated numbers of breast cancers. 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. Dr. Sherman asks, "why is [the] well-funded National Cancer Institute [of the US] not devoting its efforts to primary prevention? Has breast cancer, like so many aspects of our culture become just another business opportunity?" Her answer to her own question is devastating: "There is amassing, in a few hands, the control of production, distribution and use of pharmaceutical drugs; 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!" Environmental threats to human health and well-being are nothing new. What is new on the scale of history is the level of man-made threats. Documenting the problem is far easier than fixing it. Even if Dr. Sherman's book passes muster, attempting to dismantle a cancer-causing environment is a mammoth task. But acknowledging the problem is an important first step. Martin Henry is a communications consultant.
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