Breast cancer causes – Introduction
A 2002 issue of Time magazine (Feb 18) typified the standard approach to the subject, headlining on its cover shot of a provocatively nude woman "The New Thinking on Breast Cancer", which really just gave us the old thinking re-hashed in more bland prose:
"This year, according to the American Cancer Society, some 200,000 women (and 1,500 men) will learn that they have breast cancer – up from a little more than 100,000 two decades ago. While the death rate from the disease has dropped modestly over the past decades, there is a growing sense of frustration among cancer experts."
Obviously New Zealand and Australian women mirror the same trend and as American women breast cancer activists are already arguing, there is certainly no evidence to support the Time contention that death rates are dropping, "modestly" or otherwise. The fact is, any drop is an artefact of the way the numbers are crunched. As Australia's Health 2000 pointed out ten years ago "breast cancer is the most common cancer detected in Australian females" and "has been on the rise since the early 1980s." (1) With over 10,000 new cases diagnosed in that country every year breast cancer is in fact the most common cause of death from cancer in females and this year alone around 3,000 Australian women will die from the disease with little real comfort being offered in the way of a final solution to their problem by cancer experts, frustrated or otherwise.
A developing opinion, shared by a growing number of angry women activists all round the world, is that the cancer experts themselves are part of the problem rather than part of the solution. With medical research in this vital area now almost totally dependent on funding from the pharmaceutical and biotech industries the efforts in the area of breast cancer are now almost totally palliative and aimed at expensive treatments of the actual disease itself; treatments and drugs that can be patented and owned by their discoverers and guarantee their profits into the decades to come when breast cancer treatment and the expensive cosmetic repairs that mutilating standard therapies entail will have become an accustomed part of a woman's life. Actual research on prevention and really effective risk reduction is practically ignored because neither of these strategies appeal to what has simply become another industry – the breast cancer industry.
Yes, breast cancer is good for big business and particularly biotech big business, which is, above all, male dominated big business, where breasts are just another commodity. As a Canadian newspaper, the Toronto Star, explained a few years ago "There is fierce competition among American biotech companies to be the first to capture the lucrative market for replacement breasts for cancer patients." (2) Biotech nipples grown in the lab from pig cartilage will apparently soon be coming to a clinic near you. Curis of Cambridge, USA have developed a gene juggling nipple technology and are crowing to potential investors that sales could exceed 250,000 a year. Britain, with 26,000 new breast cancer diagnoses a year and more than 10,000 disfiguring operations, is described as "one of its biggest markets."
In all truth, the "sense of frustration" felt by cancer experts alluded to by Time is more likely to stem from the difficult choice between whether to buy another condominium in Florida or a new Mercedes. In our Emperor's New Clothes society, where the media – owned by powerful corporates – lies to us steadily, we never hear the real truth about why we have a cancer plague (which is simply because of our catastrophically polluted society) because all those in real positions of power including cancer experts, have a committed interest in things staying the same.
1. Australian Institute of Health & Welfare, Australia's Health 2000: the 7th Biennial Health Report of the AIHW, Canberra, 2000,
2. Toronto Star, 15.9.00, "Biotech firms in race to capture market for replacement breasts"