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medpundit |
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Tuesday, October 15, 2002The pink ribbon once represented the effort to transform breast cancer from a source of silent shame into a public health crisis. When was breast cancer a “source of silent shame?” When Fanny Burney wrote in great detail about her mastectomy? It never had the same stigma as AIDS or syphillis or even leprosy for crying out loud. And turning it into a “public health crisis” is equally ridiculous. Substantially fewer women die of breast cancer than of lung or colon cancer. (If any cancer could be called a “source of silent shame” it would be colon cancer whose victims often have to carry their feces around in a little bag under their clothing.) Yet no one wears ribbons for those. The writer, however, lost my support much earlier than that fatal sentence, when she condemned the pink ribbon movement not for its shallow feminist politics, but for its reliance on corporate donors: Consider Breast Cancer Awareness month, which is every October. Its founder, the drug maker AstraZeneca, manufactures the breast cancer drug tamoxifen and other chemotherapies, but until recently it made agrochemicals as well. I am not one to underestimate the profit motive of pharmaceutical companies, but they are not run by gods who sit in a boardroam on high manipulating the environment to give us cancer so they can turn around and sell us the drugs to cure it. The author sees the high rate of cancers without known risk factors as evidence that the environmental pollutants are the cause: So this month, we are likely to hear a great deal about "prevention" in the form of behavior modification and diet but will not hear that as many as half of all cancers are not associated with known risk factors. The "e word"--environment--if it comes up at all, will be quickly dismissed. Breast cancer is not a monolithic disease. It can not be reduced to one single cause or one single type. Something, somehow, goes wrong at the genetic level of a cell. That’s all it takes. One gene. One cell. After that, the cell runs amok and turns itself into an army of cellular Huns invading the body. That something could be that the wrong amino acid got spliced into its DNA at its genesis. Or it could have gone wrong sometime during the life of the cell, either during normal cell maintenance, or under the influence of a virus or some biochemical insult. The incidence of breast cancer increases with age, suggesting that the “something” that goes wrong happens, in most cases, as a consequence of cellular aging. We don’t know enough about breast cancer, or most cancers for that matter, to say exactly what happens, but we know that it's most likely caused by a host of factors, most of them beyond the control of anyone. The column ends by calling for better detection techniques and better treatment, but those will only come from the work being done by the very companies she lambasts - made possible, in part, by the profits from those "agrochemicals." posted by Sydney on 10/15/2002 07:09:00 AM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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