Blue Mass Group

Reality-based commentary on politics.

Another Take on Breast Cancer

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Now if you can’t read between the lines and conclude that our benevolent government does not have your best interests at heart then there is not much more I can do for you.

www.nationalbreastcancerprevention.org

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  1. and learning about this prevention-oriented work (r/t the precautionary principle that has taken hold in much of Europe) provides a much needed counter-balance to the depressing “Avon Walk for Breast Cancer” that’s put signs up all over Jamaica Plain today…

  2. Great article, Lasthorseman.  I like how she notes that Europe has made 1,100 things illegal.  Here, people get all flaky and wimp out, we’ve outlawed 9 of those things.  It is the same story with genetic engineering, which most European countries have banned but here we think about the jobs or the cool things we can do to our children, like give them bat wings or something.  It’s like, here we choose science fiction over science, cause it seems more interesting.  We seem to think life is too boring, we want a movie, we want a Billion dollar life science bill instead of funding health care and housing and food.

    “There is no mystery,” she says, bluntly. “We know what causes these cancers. Europe has done so much research, and they have found out precisely what the culprits are: carcinogens in our foods, our water, medications. Cosmetics. Milk and dairy. And they have made almost all of them illegal.”

    For example, the European Union has outlawed the use of more than 1,100 research-validated carcinogens from everyday cosmetics. Here, that number is nine. (Not nine thousand; not nine hundred. Nine.) Use of bovine hormones in cow’s milk is banned across Europe; here it is almost universally added.
    Why the discrepancy?

    “Profit,” Wadia-Ells declares, unstinting in this as in all her other assertions. “Our government sees the same studies, knows the same facts. They just don’t have the same constituency,” she says. “Europe’s constituency is its citizens; their health care is paid for by the government, so they have a vested interest in keeping them from getting sick” with such deadly and costly diseases as cancer.

    “Here, for our government, sad to say – the constituency is not [consumers]. It’s big business. The money that would be lost to the pharmaceutical industry, the health care industry [if such laws were passed here] -” she pauses, and shakes her head. “Big money only flows once a diagnosis is made,” she points out, “and treatment begins. And make no mistake – it flows big.”

    Is Wadia-Ells aware of what she is saying: that our government, pharmaceutical industry, even our health care industry, are willfully ignoring the evidence of what causes cancer so profits for diagnosing and treating it will remain high?
    Yes.

    “We have to start looking at the other end,” she says. “Teach women how it starts. What happens in the breast to start cancer? What happens in a cell when a poison or radiation causes damage? We have to protect ourselves by starting at that point.”

    Wadia-Ells compares a preventative approach to breast cancer to wearing a seatbelt in a car that’s hurtling down the highway. Do we pour money only into the ambulances and medical response to the tragic consequences of a crash without seatbelts, or do we protect ourselves by understanding that seatbelts save lives?

    “We want major breast cancer foundations to begin spending 50 percent of their funding on better understanding of the environmental and pharmaceutical causes of breast cancer,” one of NBCPP’s brochures declares.

  3. Thanks for sharing the article.  I have to tell you, I’ve never labored under the delusion that Big Pharma was out for anything but themselves.  Proof of that is Medicaid Part D.  The message in that article, however, is that everyone should consider embracing a whole food, nonchemically enhanced diet.  

  4. of life taken over by profit driven interests.
    Superclass by David Rothkopf outlines hundreds of other similar situations.

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