The Biggest Breast Cancer Risk Factor That No One Is Talking About

During October, women are bombarded with media telling us what we can do to stop breast cancer. Article after article after television human interest segment informs us about personal risk factors such as smoking and being overweight (although 70 percent of women who are diagnosed with breast cancer have none of these factors) and about genetic risks (which only account for 10 percent of breast cancers.) We are bombarded with stories about the importance of getting mammograms and other tests. Then there are the survivor stories (usually about women much younger, whiter and cover-girl prettier than the average breast cancer survivor) that pull at our heartstrings. But there is very little mention of environmental factors such as auto exhaust, and chemicals like parabens and phthalates that we are exposed to every day.

The most deafening silence, however, is about radiation, which is a 100 percent known cause of cancer. We are exposed to radiation in a variety of ways, through X-rays, CT scans and mammograms, but also by living near a nuclear power plant or having been exposed to weaponry that uses depleted uranium.

Leuren Moret is geoscientist who has been working for a number of years to raise awareness about the dangers of radiation, an issue she became concerned about after hearing Native American women who live near areas where nuclear weapons have been tested talk about cancer and other health problems they are experiencing and by a visit to Nagasaki and Hiroshima, Japan. In this interview, she talks about what we know about the relationship between radiation and breast cancer.

Lucinda Marshall: In your recent article published in Namaste magazine, "Populations Exposed to Environmental Uranium: Increased Risk of Infertility and Reproductive Cancers," you wrote about a scientific study that found that "radiation is the only known cause of breast cancer in mice" and about findings that show that Navajo women who live near uranium mining operations have very high rates of breast cancer. What does that tell us about the connection between uranium and radiation and cancer?

Leuren Moret: The scientific study that found "radiation is the only known cause of breast cancer in mice" was conducted at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, home of the Manhattan Project -- the World War II atomic bomb development project which produced the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs -- and where they have been studying the biological/environmental effects of radiation for 68 years. After billions of dollars in research funds, however, they could never identify the cause of breast cancer in women.

The newest published peer-reviewed study, by a Navajo researcher, provides the scientific evidence published by U.S. government sources that low levels of uranium in drinking water, below EPA drinking water standards, is an estrogen and hormone disruptor. The animal studies are important because we have the same hormones and similar estrogen responses as animals.

Before 1945, cancer mortality was very rare. Large increases in cancer mortality in the past 100 years begin with the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs dropped on Japan in 1945. A Japanese government map of the major causes of death in Japan from 1899 to 2004 shows that cancer mortality increased rapidly after 1945. With the introduction of each new nuclear technology since 1945 -- atmospheric testing, nuclear power plants, depleted uranium -- it is obvious that ionizing radiation is a major cause of cancer globally, and uranium is a major radioactive component of nuclear weapons, including depleted uranium weapons systems introduced to the battlefield in 1991 in Gulf War I.

This breast cancer map from Centers for Disease Control data (see below illustration) identifies that within a 100-mile radius of nuclear reactors is where two-thirds of all U.S. breast cancer deaths occurred between 1985 and 1989. The map (see below illustration) of nuclear power plants in the U.S. identifies them as the major cause of breast cancer in the U.S., as well as nuclear weapons labs in New Mexico, Idaho, Washington and California. This is further confirmed by the breast cancer clusters identified in Japan and California, which occurred where it rained the day the Chernobyl radiation cloud passed over and the rain deposited the fission products in the environment.