Inside Prevention

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.

Phthalates and BPA make an unexpected appearance

A new dietary intervention study suggests that an individual may not be able to avoid food packaging chemicals like phthalates (plastic softeners) and BPA (found in canned foods and older hard plastic containers) by cutting out canned and plastic-wrapped foods because these chemicals can—and do—enter the food during processing.

Researchers from the University of Washington replicated the 2011 Breast Cancer Fund and Silent Spring Institute dietary intervention study and found DEHP (a phthalate used in food packaging) levels increased 24-fold during the intervention.

The researchers were puzzled by this finding—our study found phthalate and BPA levels declined during the intervention diet—so they followed up by testing spices and dairy used in the intervention diet. They found high levels of DEHP in spices like coriander, cinnamon and cayenne pepper, as well as in dairy products.

The researchers also found modest increases in BPA during the intervention. This finding may be due to a study population who already ate mostly fresh foods—in fact, only three of the 10 families who participated indicated eating canned foods.

These findings underscore the need for federal reform of food contact laws that can ensure chemicals linked to hormone disruption don't end up in our food supply. The FDA has the authority to regulate chemicals our food touches at all points in the process from field to table: from the type of plastic tubing used in milking equipment, to the containers spices are held in before being divvied up in store-shelf sizes, to the plastic wrap on supermarket cheese.

Our role is to see that the FDA actually uses this power to protect our health.

For more on this study, check out Fast Company (You’re Eating Toxic Chemicals, Even If You Eat Organic And Avoid Plastic) and the NRDC blog (What's for lunch? Likely a few hormone-disrupting chemicals - phthalates and BPA).

Study shows increase in metastatic breast cancer at first diagnosis for young women

A paper published yesterday in the Journal of the American Medical Association describes a small but statistically significant increase in the incidence of breast cancer with remote metastases (breast cancer that has spread to other parts of the body, including the bones, brain and lungs) at first diagnosis for women aged 25 to 39 years.

This statistical study examined the incidence of breast cancer in women in the U.S. from 1976 to 2009. The increase in remote metastases at first diagnosis was not seen in older women. There was also no increase in the incidence of local breast cancer (confined to the breast only) or regional breast cancer (cancer that has spread to adjacent organs like lymph nodes or the chest wall) diagnoses in younger women.

There's been a lot of commentary on this paper already, some of which has been potentially misleading. Our friends at the Young Survival Coalition have published an in-depth and thoughtful blog post on this paper that puts this new data into context.

There is a need for more research to confirm this finding—something the paper's authors agree needs to be done.

If this increase is confirmed, we need to find out how such an increase could occur within a single generation of women. In particular, we want to know what's causing metastatic breast cancer—including potential environmental exposures—among women of all ages.

U.S. report urges deeper look into breast cancer's environmental links (Center for Public Integrity, 2/12/2013)

More coverage of this week's major report release, this from the Center for Public Integrity:

Compiled by the congressionally mandated Interagency Breast Cancer and Environmental Research Coordinating Committee, the report notes that most cases of breast cancer “occur in people with no family history,” suggesting that “environmental factors — broadly defined — must play a major role in the etiology of the disease.”

Yet only a fraction of federal research funding has gone toward examining links between breast cancer and ubiquitous chemicals such as the plastic hardening agent bisphenol A; the herbicide atrazine; and dioxin, a byproduct of plastics manufacturing and burning, says the report, prepared for Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and released today.

“Prevention needs to be as important as other investments that are made in screening, treatment and access to care,” Jeanne Rizzo, co-chair of the committee and president of the San Francisco-based Breast Cancer Fund, said in an interview. (Read complete article.)

Emphasizing breast cancer prevention (San Francisco Chronicle, 2/11/2013)

The San Francisco Chronicle weighed in on yesterday's game-changing report in an editorial that urges lawmakers to take action:

"So now it will be up to the Obama administration and Congress to act on this compelling case to prioritize prevention on a disease that is costing 40,000 lives and more than $17 billion a year...This report should give Washington the political will it needs to put the nation's health interest first."

The editorial echoes (and quotes) the voice of Breast Cancer Fund President and CEO Jeanne Rizzo:

"We are all exposed to a cocktail of carcinogens and endocrine disrupters every day that puts us at greater risk for breast cancer, and we need to prioritize and invest in identifying and preventing exposures to these chemicals."(Read complete article.)

Welcome to the breast cancer prevention era? (Huffington Post, 2/13/2013)

Read and share this new Huffington Post blog by Jeanne Rizzo, President and CEO of the Breast Cancer Fund, as well as co-chair of the federal advisory committee that yesterday released a report concluding that preventing environmental exposures is the most promising path to decrease incidence of the disease.

Is this indeed the start of a new era in breast cancer awareness, research and -- yes -- prevention? We hope so.

If you're under 50, you can't remember the dark days when the tobacco industry was winning the PR war, insisting that smoking wasn't linked to cancer. That all changed in 1964 when the Surgeon General's report on smoking and health created a seismic shift, alerting the nation to the health risks of tobacco and, notably, moving the focus from individual behavior to the public-health impacts of smoking. The report ushered in an anti-smoking era, complete with a national strategy that reshaped the research agenda and inspired policies and public education initiatives that greatly reduced smoking across the nation.

With the release of a groundbreaking federal report today, there's hope that we're entering a breast cancer prevention era -- one in which my young granddaughters won't remember a time when the chemical industry got away with its story that breast cancer isn't linked to chemical exposures, and when the only focus on prevention was on personal behavior. (Read complete article.)