Pesticides & Cancer
As I've been emphasising in the few media outlets prepared to risk carrying my critique of the cancer status quo (chemical industry litigation threats take precedence over public safety), the evidence of a chemical industry complicity in breast cancer is right on our own doorsteps. Dr Kate Short, way back in 1994 alerted Australians to the toll cancer took on rural communities in her book Quick Poison – Slow Poison – Pesticide Risk in the Lucky Country (3) and four years ago the potential risks to mother and child of common pesticide chemicals were highlighted in a Townsville study (4) of the first bowel discharges (meconium) of new born infants. This relatively recent Australian study detected lindane in 78% of samples, PCP 43%, chlorpyrifos 59%, malathion 34%, chlordane 16%, DDT 52%, and PCB 27%.
While the chemicals were detected in the nanogram range, the fact that dangerous neurotoxins banned elsewhere, like chlorpyrifos and malathion were detected at all should have set alarm bells ringing all around Australia and particularly in Canberra. Each one of these pollutants, originally in the bodies of the women bearing these infants, is associated with promoting cancers and/or affecting the brain, immune, and endocrine (especially thyroid) systems of the unborn and Dr Short's book showed that these same chemicals are in common use in agricultural communities throughout Australia and not just a Townsville phenomena.
There has been a whole raft of studies on the oestrogen-mimicking characteristics of the organochlorine group of pesticides (DDT, PCBs, lindane, chlordane, etc) widely recorded over the years in Australian women and reported in the regular Australian Market Basket reports of Food Standards Australia New Zealand (FSANZ) and its predecessor, the Australia New Zealand Food Authority, as a routine inclusion in our daily supermarket diets. It's no wonder that with the all-pervasive presence of these chemicals in the international food chain, women worldwide are being struck down with a rising tide of cancers, and particularly cancers of the breast, where organochlorine chemicals are particularly implicated due to their hormone-imitating characteristic.
An Israeli study (5), widely publicised in the 1990s to the medical community but largely ignored even by "cancer experts", indicated a dramatic drop – more than 30 percent – in breast cancer rates when just TWO common organochlorine pesticides- lindane and benzene hexachloride (BHC) – were banned from use on Israel dairy farms in 1978. The two, plus the ubiquitous DDT/DDE, which still shows up regularly in the breast milk of Australian and New Zealand women, had been implicated in Israel's high rate of breast cancer which had caused widespread public concern.
IN OTHER WORDS – THE ISRAEL GOVERNMENT ACTUALLY TOOK CONCRETE ACTION TO HELP ISRAELI WOMEN – very unusual in modern terms when we discuss REAL ACTION over breast cancer and not just wearing sentimental pink ribbons once a year!
The real scandal, as far as Australian women are concerned, is that all three of the chemicals directly identified in the Israeli study as causal factors in breast cancer – lindane, BHC and DDT – are still actively present in the Australian environment - as indicated by regulatory authority testing programmes and the Townsville study - and Canberra is doing absolutely nothing to eradicate the organochlorine pesticide risk to women (and men) from these chemicals and the over 100 others of the same type in daily use in Australia and elsewhere. In Israel, removal of the three resulted in such an atypical and marked drop in breast cancer that the phenomena has since been labelled the "Israeli Anomaly" – and yet "cancer experts" still declare that "we don't know what causes breast cancer." And then we find the bodies of Australian infants – and their mothers, let's remember – contain known carcinogens causing breast cancer and our experts not only ignore it, but rabbit on as if the whole question of breast cancer was full of unsolved mysteries. Australian women should be getting very, very angry!
A recent (June 2008) statement in the US Breast Cancer Fund newsletter notes that the chemical involvement in breast cancer is too important to be ignored any longer – “Chemicals in pesticides, fuels, plastics, air pollution, detergents, industrial solvents, tobacco smoke, prescription drugs, food additives, metals and personal care products interfere with natural hormones and have been linked to an increased risk of breast cancer and other health problems.” The Fund is asking for support of the recently introduced US Environmental Hormone Disruption Research Act, which would establish a comprehensive research program to better understand the impact of hormone-disrupting pollutants in the environment on the health of women and children.
Of course the role of all these chemicals in hormone disruption has been noted in the research for simply years and years. Rachel Carson, who herself died of breast cancer several years after publication of her epic work Silent Spring in 1963, alerted the world to the chemical involvement in cancer at that date, now 46 years ago. In New Zealand our political, regulatory and medical authorities have completely ignored the whole issue. Little wonder that cancer is now our top-killing disease and bound to rise still further over the next decade.
Reporting on the use of atrazine, another common agricultural pesticide in regular use in New Zealand, University of California San Francisco (UCSF) researchers recently noted that the chemical could cause serious problems in humans and that exposure appears to stimulate a gene that encodes aromatase, which converts androgens like testosterone to oestrogens. It is the oestrogen-stimulating function in the organochlorine pesticides that appears to be their function in the causation of breast cancers. Obviously, as was found in the Israeli research so many years ago, simple removal of the whole organochlorine group of chemicals from our environment – they are NOT essential in agriculture – would benefit us all.
Obviously, if we wish to stop breast cancer in particular and cancers in general, our first step should be a total clean-up of the whole food chain led by firm Government action. And let's not forget the whole contentious issue of food additives - colourants, taste enhancers (MSG!), mouth-feel enhancers, preservatives - and toxic food packaging while we're at it! One of the vital food issues that critics like Australia's own Sue Dengate (Fed Up & Different Kids) and New Zealand's Sue Kedgley (Eating Safely in a Toxic World) have been documenting in their books for over a decade is the degree to which practically all supermarket-available packaged and prepared food is poisoned by the mindless stupidity/cupidity of the food industry.
Women, as the chief household shoppers, of course have a simple solution to this situation. Simply start demanding from your local supermarket that they stock more guaranteed organic, pesticide-residue-free and additive-free food and market forces will force farmers, growers and the food industry into taking the necessary steps to reform. Such steps have already been taken by a few supermarkets in the United Kingdom and in Europe. Farmers might also ponder why cancer – which hardly used to exist in rural districts – is now part of daily farm life.
Some typical Western dietary habits probably need to change also if we are going to beat breast cancer once and for all. Take milk and icecream, for example. Professor Jane Plant has, I believe, successfully laid out the case against all dairy products, including the formerly acceptable yoghurt in its various PC forms, in her book Your Life in Your Hands – Understanding, Preventing & Overcoming Breast Cancer. When she herself stopped all consumption of dairy – milk, cheese, yoghurt, icecream, the lot – the steady recurrence of small tumours in her one remaining breast stopped.
3. Dr Kate Short, Quick Poison – Slow Poison – Pesticide Risk in the Lucky Country, Envirobook, Sydney, 1994. Enquiries regarding copies to Kate Short, 493 Wollombi Rd, St Albans 2775, Australia or Total Environment Centre, Shop 1, Gloucester Walk, 88 Cumberland St, Sydney, NSW 2000, Tel: (02) 247 4714, Fax: (02) 247 7118.
4. "Environmental pollutants in meconium in Townsville, Australia", by Deuble L, Whitehall JF, Bolisetty S, Patole SK, Ostrea EM* and Whitehall JS., Department of Neonatology, Kirwan Hospital for Women, Townsville. *Department of Pediatrics, Wayne State University, Michigan, June 2000.
5. J. B. Westin & E. Richter, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel, "The Israeli Breast-Cancer Anomaly, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Vol 604, 1990.