Advocacy Groups Ignore Breast Cancer Hot Spots

Editor's Note:This article is excerpted from the fall 2006 issue of Ms. magazine, available on newsstands now.

Living on the wild, craggy elbow of Cape Cod, Jane Chase feels lucky to have spent 50 years in a house facing Nantucket Sound. "We love it here," she says, looking out over a marsh at a spectacular sunset on Red River Beach.

It wasn't until a few years ago, when a community effort was launched to understand the strangely high rate of breast cancer on Cape Cod, that the mother of six considered her South Harwich, Mass., home to be anything other than a bucolic haven.

The two-time breast cancer survivor might never have linked her disease to the environment had she not joined a local cancer group and later enlisted in a household health study. She then learned that her classic colonial garrison house harbored lurking toxins, and that her idyllic neighborhood had likely been aerially sprayed with now-banned organochlorine pesticides such as DDT.

Cape Cod, with a breast cancer rate 20 percent higher than the rest of Massachusetts, is just one of a several places around the United States with the dubious distinction of being a "hot spot" on our nation's increasingly lit-up breast cancer map. It's joined by Long Island, Marin County and San Francisco -- places where a controversy has brewed for years -- and newly emerging areas such as the Puget Sound in Washington state and Brownsville, Texas.

A large cluster of elevated mortality rates for breast cancer, extending from the Mid-Atlantic through the Northeastern states, has "persisted for many years," says Deborah Winn of the National Cancer Institute (NCI). In the Northeast, rates are about 16 percent higher than the rest of the U.S. and in the smaller swatch from New York City to Philadelphia rates are 7 percent higher than the rest of the Northeast.

The reasons for variable rates of the disease are not well understood, according to Winn. But what is clear is that the discovery of hot spots have sparked a new breast-cancer environmental movement, with strong local advocacy groups as well as new national groups.

Long Island activists began drawing their own breast cancer maps in 1992, pinpointing neighbors' homes as if they were battlefield targets. As more hot spots were identified, each touched off a surge of interest. On Cape Cod, women "called on researchers, like ourselves, to begin studying the problem," says Julia Brody of Silent Spring Institute, in Newton, Mass. Long Island activists went to Congress for research funding to investigate possible environmental factors.

"They felt there was a bias in the scientific literature toward 'known risk factors' for the disease, and that these tend to reside with the personal [factors] -- like [use of] alcohol, tobacco and birth control," says Scott Carlin, a geographer at C.W. Post College. "And there's not an equally well-studied and known list of risk factors in the environmental spheres."

The first flurry of environmental studies proved inconclusive, but activists and scientists have not stopped pursuing the environmental questions. Far from it: Interest in environmental factors is growing, says Kevin Donegan of the Breast Cancer Fund (BCF), one of several national breast cancer advocacy groups that formed in the 1990s. "Our own polls show an overwhelming majority of people believe that pollution of various kinds is driving this disease," he says.

In 2006, some 270,000 U.S. women -- and men, too, since a small percentage are prone -- will learn that they have some form of breast cancer. The American Cancer Society predicts that, of those cases, more than 40,000 will die of the disease. Worldwide, an estimated 1.2 million people will be diagnosed with breast cancer this year, but women living in North America maintain the highest rate of the disease.