The Breast Cancer Money-Go-Round

They're good girls and boys. Racing for the cure. Crying for the cameras. Sharing their pain. Wearing that crown of thorns like a halo. Nice folks. And aren't they "better people" for just having "survived" breast cancer?

Or ... are they being played for suckers? Conned by a clever marketing strategy that makes heroes out of victims, and saints out of sinners. Racing for the cure, but running from the cause.

Most of the well-financed breast cancer organizations make little or no mention of the non-genetic causes of breast cancer. Go to their websites. Read their literature. These organizations don't focus on the environmental and pharmacological causes of this epidemic because it's a dank dark alley that leads right to their corporate sponsors.

"National Breast Cancer Awareness Month was established by Zeneca, a bioscience company with sales of $8.62 billion in 1997. Forty-nine percent of Zeneca's 1997 profits came from pesticides and other industrial chemicals, and 49 percent were from pharmaceutical sales, one-third (about $1.4 billion's worth) of which were cancer treatment drugs," says the Green Guide, a publication of the Green Guide Institute.

Zeneca also makes Tamoxifen, "a known carcinogen" according to the National Institutes of Health (NIH). After only a few years of exposure, Tamoxifen can actually cause breast cancer, says a 1999 study from Duke University. "There is strong evidence of Tamoxifen's toxicity, including high risks of uterine, gastrointestinal and fatal liver cancer," reports The Cancer Information Network, adding that The Breast Cancer Prevention Trial (BCPT) conducted by the National Surgical Adjuvant Breast and Bowel Project (NSABP) "found that women taking Tamoxifen had more than twice the chance of developing uterine cancer compared with women on placebo."

General Electric is a huge global conglomerate that provides all kinds of products and services. GE also owns health clinics that use GE equipment that can expose patients to different types of radiation. GE makes ultrasound, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and mammography machines -- a known cause of breast cancer in younger women. In addition, there are 91 nuclear power plants based on the GE design operating in 11 countries, says GE on its website. Nuclear power plants are a known source of radiation leakage.

Radiation is a "complete carcinogen" says Dr. Peter Montegue, in his 1997 5-part series, "The Truth About Breast Cancer." Montegue writes, "Very few things have the ability to initiate cancer AND promote it AND make it progress. Things that can do this are called "complete carcinogens." By analyzing 50 years of U.S. National Cancer Institute data, Dr. Jay Gould, director of the Radiation and Public Health Project, Inc., says, "of the 3,000-odd counties in the United States, women living in about 1,300 nuclear counties (located within 100 miles of a reactor) are at the greatest risk of dying of breast cancer." GE is also a contributor to many efforts to "battle" breast cancer.

Other corporations, such as Rhone-Poulec, Rohm & Hass, Eli Lilly Novartis, American Cyanamid and Dupont, have also profiteered from both sides of this manufactured epidemic.

In addition to these duplicitous industries and their heavily financed non-profit partners-in-deception, is the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Its cozy relationship to (and increasing financial reliance on) business and industry through organizations like the Centers for Disease Control Foundation, are a blatant conflict of interest. Not surprisingly, the NIH website for breast cancer research is very similar to research funded by the top breast cancer organizations... it's all about detection, cures, and genetics. Of the 14 areas of research listed, only two studies relate to the links between breast cancer and non-genetic influences. And those studies dismiss the notion of any connection.