Inside Prevention

California says BPA is toxic, France warns pregnant women

Gretchen Lee Salter, the Breast Cancer Fund's senior policy manager, reacts to this week's big BPA news.

There were two big strikes against BPA this week. Yesterday California added BPA to the state's Proposition 65 list of chemicals known to cause cancer or birth defects. 

On Monday, the French government warned pregnant women to stay away from BPA. In their warning, French authorities point to the numerous studies linking prenatal exposure to BPA with increased risk for later breast cancer. This warning comes on the heels of a new French law that will ban BPA from all food packaging, including food cans by 2015. 

The Prop 65 listing and French government's warning are powerful indictments of this toxic chemical that the industry has argued is safe, despite waves of peer-reviewed scientific studies finding that BPA harms reproduction, and is linked to infertility and breast cancer.

While I'm heartened by these steps, we need our governments and industry to take even more decisive action to protect the public health. We’ve known for years about the dangers of BPA, especially to pregnant women, who should not have to worry whether or not their canned food is toxic. When I was pregnant three years ago, I did everything I could to stay away from BPA in canned food. But I was lucky. I had access to fresh fruits and vegetables and alternatives to canned soups and meals.

The Breast Cancer Fund's Cans Not Cancer campaign is working to make sure everyone is protected from BPA. We're pressuring canned food manufacturers to stop using BPA and to ensure the safety of any alternative chemical used in its place. We're also working with states around the country and with members of Congress to pass legislation to require the labeling of canned food containing BPA.

So while we applaud California and France, we all need to call on governments and industry to get this toxic chemical out of our products.

 

Big day for safer chemicals initiatives

If we want to transform how our society thinks about and uses chemicals, we need to shift markets and shift policy.

Today two initiatives were launched that will take us in the right direction:

• The reintroduction of the Safe Chemicals Act in the U.S. Senate by Frank Lautenberg and Kirsten Gillibrand
• The launch of Mind The Store, a campaign  targeting retailers headed by our partners at the Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families Coalition

The Safe Chemicals Act  would overhaul the archaic Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976. A Philadelphia Inquirer article mentions our involvement in this issue and notes that TSCA is the only major environmental law passed in the 1970s that hasn’t been updated:

“When it was passed, TSCA grandfathered in about 60,000 chemicals. Now, more than 80,000 chemicals are in common use. The EPA can call for safety testing only after evidence of potential danger. The EPA has been able to require testing on only about 200 chemicals, and has regulated or banned five.”

The bill would give the EPA the necessary tools to oversee safety testing of toxic chemicals. It would put the burden on industry to prove that chemicals are safe before being put in products we use in our homes and schools.

We were also mentioned in a USA Today article about Mind the Store, a campaign headed by the Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families coalition asking the top 10 retailers in the country to determine whether or not hazardous chemicals are present in the products they sell. If these retailers do sell products containing chemicals from the Hazardous 100+ List, we're asking them to develop a public action plan within the next 12 months to address these chemicals, including reducing, eliminating or safely substituting the chemicals as appropriate.

In the end, we need both market and legislative initiatives to change the landscape of chemical use in our country. Take action by telling your senator to support the Safe Chemicals Act. Its passage will reduce breast cancer incidence in our country and lead to a healthier world for future generations.

Does ExxonMobil have your senator's ear?

If you live in Louisiana, the answer is yes. But even if you don't, you might want to chat with the public officials you voted into office.

We see a lot of chemical industry shenanigans in our legislative efforts to protect people from toxic chemicals, both in Washington and in statehouses. But this is too much:

Sen. David Vitter, a Republican from Louisiana, last year opposed the Safe Chemicals Act, and pledged to write his own bill on chemical regulations. Based on reports of who he's been meeting with—Dow Chemical, ExxonMobil—and who he's not—no health or environmental groups, to our knowledge—this bill promises to be less about protecting people from toxic chemicals than about protecting chemical companies from regulation. 

Now Sen. Vitter is trying to drum up bipartisan support for his "Pro-Chemicals Act." If you're not sure where your senators stand on chemicals policy reform, now's the time to ask.

We suspect Sen. Vitter's bill will be introduced around the same time as Sen. Lautenberg reintroduces the Safe Chemicals Act—a classic case of strategic confusion. But make no mistake: the Lautenberg bill is the one that protects our health.

In fact, a recent federal advisory committee report on breast cancer points to key elements of the Safe Chemicals Act—safety standards that protect human health (and follow recommendations from the American Academy of Pediatrics), required safety reviews of new chemicals by manufacturers, action on chemicals found to be toxic—in its recommendations for breast cancer prevention.

By contrast, Sen. Vitter has gone on record opposing both the safety standard proposed in the Safe Chemicals Act and safety reviews for new chemicals.

Email or call your senator's office now and ask him or her to steer clear of Sen. Vitter's bad bill and instead support Sen. Lautenberg's Safe Chemicals Act. ExxonMobil and Sen. Vitter don't speak for us.

Congress re-introduces safe cosmetics legislation in attempt to update 1938 law

Today, Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., and Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., introduced the Safe Cosmetics and Personal Care Products Act of 2013, which would give the Food and Drug Administration authority to regulate the products we use for grooming, primping and beautifying.

Loopholes in current federal law have left the U.S. cosmetics industry basically unregulated. That means that companies can put ingredients linked to breast cancer (or any other other disease), including phthalates, 1,4-dioxane, parabens and ethylene oxide in everything from shampoo to hand soap to lipstick.

Instead of meeting public demand for truly healthier products, the cosmetics industry would prefer to maintain the status quo. In fact, the industry has spent more than $3.5 million lobbying against similar legislation, according to ABC News.

The 1938 law that currently regulates cosmetics companies has created a free-for-all—one in which consumers are the big losers. Companies essentially can put whatever they want in their products and they don’t even have to tell the public about the ingredients they use. To top it off, they can slap an organic, natural or unscented label on a product, with no oversight. As a result, the majority of chemicals in cosmetics have not been assessed for safety, and more than 500 products sold to U.S. consumers contain ingredients banned in cosmetics in Japan, Canada or the European Union, according to the Environmental Working Group.

At the Breast Cancer Fund we believe preventing exposure to environmental risk factors, including exposures to harmful chemicals in personal care products, will enable us to protect women from being diagnosed with breast cancer in the first place.

Tell your member of Congress that it’s time to fix this broken regulatory system. Take action today.

Media Roundup: Groundbreaking report on breast cancer and the environment (2/11/13- 3/7/13)

A congressionally mandated federal advisory committee of leading breast cancer experts, co-chaired by Breast Cancer Fund President and CEO Jeanne Rizzo, released a report on Feb. 12 entitled "Breast Cancer and the Environment: Prioritizing Prevention." The report could mark a turning point in how our government acts on breast cancer, and it generated the attention of more than 80 media outlets across the country including:

Courier Journal

The Philadelphia Inquirer

The China Post

WTOP-FM

HealthyCal

Los Angeles Daily News

McCarthy a strong choice for EPA chief

Today President Obama nominated Gina McCarthy to head the Environmental Protection Agency, and we at the Breast Cancer Fund think he’s made a wise decision.

Nancy Buermeyer, our senior policy strategist, said, “Based on her record of working with both Democrats and Republicans to support environmental health, Gina McCarthy is a great choice to head the Environmental Protection Agency. We encourage Congress to confirm her quickly. The Breast Cancer Fund will look to McCarthy to continue former EPA Chief Lisa Jackson’s focus on doing everything the agency can to protect the public from toxic chemicals, as well as calling on Congress to reform the broken Toxic Substances Control Act.”

According to The Washington Post’s Wonkblog, she could be President Obama’s most significant nominee.

Breast cancer ties to environment probed (San Francisco Chronicle, 2/27/2013)

News stories exploring the links between breast cancer and the environment are popping up all over the place. A great trend piece in the San Francisco Chronicle highlights some of the recent research and reports, and tells the story of Breast Cancer Fund Strong Voice Marika Holmgren who was diagnosed with breast cancer at age 37 and started to ask questions that spurred her into activism: 

Could it have been the chemicals in the blush and lipstick she once wore daily? Did it matter that she lives in Half Moon Bay, where breast cancer rates exceed the state average?

"When I got diagnosed, I really started to understand how many women were out there with very few risk factors, including myself," she said. "It makes us start to wonder, what can we be doing to lower those numbers and increase prevention and eradicate environmental risk factors?"

The San Francisco Chronicle also re-printed an Environmental Health News series that poses the question: 

"How can we begin to find a cure if we don’t first know the cause?"

The series features a longitudinal study of the environmental causes of breast cancer, which uses data from 15,000 Bay Area women.

We're making history today

"Evidence suggests that breast cancer can be prevented."

While these words might not seem revolutionary to those of us who have been working to prevent the disease for years, they will make big news today because of who is saying them: a federal committee of leading breast cancer experts, co-chaired by Breast Cancer Fund President and CEO Jeanne Rizzo. The committee’s report calls for a shift in the multi-billion dollar breast cancer research agenda toward prevention. That’s groundbreaking! 

This congressionally mandated Interagency Breast Cancer and Environmental Research Coordinating Committee concludes that preventing exposure to environmental risk factors is the most promising path to decrease incidence of the disease, and is the "key to reducing the burden" on individuals, families and society. 

Sound familiar? That’s because this report builds on work the Breast Cancer Fund has been doing for more than a decade. We were honored to be part of developing this important report, and will continue to work to bring about its vision of a sea change in the way our society views and understands breast cancer.

Read our press release, take action and stay tuned for more information about this paradigm-shifting report.

Eat like a Mennonite (New York Times, 1/18/2013)

What does it take for a modern American family to lower its BPA levels? Author Florence Williams offers a peek into her stint in the nearly-plastic-free world in an opinion piece for the New York Times:

On the second day of my chemical-detox diet, I was very hungry. I’d been eating like a rabbit, all carrots and greens that I’d gathered, barehanded, from the baskets of the farmer’s market, no gloves or plastic bags allowed. I cooked up some quinoa that I bought packaged in paper from the supermarket sometimes known as Whole Paycheck. I was effectively a vegan because I couldn’t find meat or cheese that wasn’t wrapped in plastic, and I didn’t have access to accommodating livestock.

My 7-year-old daughter and I were participating in a pilot study conducted in 2011 by the Silent Spring Institute and the Breast Cancer Fund (a follow-up study was published later that year in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives). We had urinated into some glass containers a few weeks earlier, back when we were "normal" Americans, and now we were spending three days trying to reduce our exposure to plastics before supplying our urine again.

As Williams notes, the "normal" phase of the study, which allowed for painted toenails and canned beans, was more fun. Yet it's possible to create modern conveniences that don't leave toxic traces in their human consumers.

Says Williams, "It's why we need the government to require testing of commercial chemicals for hormonal effects, and to regulate them in a meaningful way. And it's why we need manufacturers to design products with safer substances in the first place." (Read complete article.)

DES and breast cancer lawsuit settled

Big news yesterday out of Boston: Pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly has settled a case brought against it by four sisters who developed breast cancer in their forties, decades after their mother took the synthetic estrogen DES (Diethylstilbesterol) during her pregnancies. A total of 51 women have filed lawsuits in Boston against more than a dozen companies that made or marketed DES, and this was the first case to go to trial. The settlement was announced Wednesday on the second day of testimony.

This is the latest chapter in the tragic legacy of DES. Between 1938 and 1971, doctors prescribed DES for millions of pregnant women to prevent miscarriages – without having been tested for its effect on fetuses. It is now clear that not only was DES ineffective for preventing miscarriages but it had devastating effects on those exposed in the womb. The drug was banned when daughters of women who took the drug were found to have higher rates of an extremely rare vaginal cancer when compared to the daughters of women who did not take the drug. Later, evidence emerged that DES exposure is also associated with an increased risk of breast cancer in the women who took it during the 1950s.

In a follow-up study of daughters who were exposed prenatally to DES, a nearly twofold increase in breast cancer risk was observed in women older than age 40. An even greater effect was found for women over the age of 50, although relatively few of the daughters had yet reached that age at the time of the study. Women exposed in utero who had the most severe abnormalities of their vaginal epithelial cells (an indicator of exposures to higher doses of DES) also had a higher risk for developing breast cancer. The evidence about the health consequences of DES was one of the first indicators that exposure to endocrine-disrupting compounds in the womb can increase risk for later life breast cancer.

The story of DES should serve as a cautionary tale. This tale underscores the need for chemicals testing protocols that consider the risks of exposures early in life. We need chemical testing that looks at the effects of chemicals across the lifespan and that measures early signs for concern – such as exposure-induced changes to how the mammary gland develops – if we are going to prevent such tragic events in the future. And this evidence needs to be folded into comprehensive chemicals policies that ensure these kinds of exposures do not occur as the result of prescribed pharmaceuticals or from inadvertent exposure to chemicals used for other purposes.