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The pharmaceutical giant, AstraZeneca,
is a multimillion-dollar donor to the ACS. AstraZeneca influences
every leaflet, poster,
and commercial product produced by the ACS Breast Cancer Awareness
campaign. It's no wonder these publications focus almost exclusively
on mammography while ignoring carcinogenic industrial chemicals
and their relation to breast cancer. When it founded Breast Cancer
Awareness Month in 1985, AstraZeneca (formerly known as Zeneca
before it merged with the Swedish pharmaceutical company Astra)
was owned by Imperial Chemical Industries, a leading international
manufacturer of industrial chemicals and carcinogenic pesticides.
National Breast Cancer Awareness Month is a masterful public relations
coup for AstraZeneca, providing the company with valuable, albeit
undeserved, goodwill from millions of American women.
AstraZeneca profits from treating breast cancer,
and hopes to profit still more from the prospects of large-scale
national use of Tamoxifen
for breast cancer "prevention." The NCI and the ACS both
embraced AstraZeneca's new drug, aggressively launching a "chemoprevention" program
in 1992 aimed at recruiting 16,000 healthy women at "high
risk" of breast cancer. The five-year clinical trial claimed
that Tamoxifen reduced breast cancer risks by 30 percent. The risks
of this toxic drug, including potentially fatal uterine cancer
and blood clots, were noted but trivialized. As the trials progressed,
it became clear that the risk of serious complications outweighed
professed benefits. Women have still not been informed about delayed
risks of liver cancer. Equally troubling, neither the ACS nor the
NCI has pursued evidence that regular use of a cheap, nonpatented,
over-the-counter drug—aspirin—has been shown to reduce
risks of breast cancer. (A 1996 study found that women who took
aspirin three times a week for five years reduced their risk by
up to 30 percent, a finding worth pursuing.)
For years the ACS demonstrated its allegiance
to the multibillion-dollar cancer drug industry by aggressively
attacking potential competitors
through its "Committee on Unproven Methods of Cancer Management," created
to "review" unorthodox or alternative therapies. This
committee, staffed by "volunteer health care professionals," invariably
promoted mainstream, expensive, and arguably toxic drugs patented
by major pharmaceutical companies, and opposed alternative or "unproven" therapies,
which are generally cheap, non-patentable, and minimally toxic.
As with Senator Joseph McCarthy's blacklist of suspected communists,
once a clinician or oncologist was associated with "unproven
methods," harassment and blackballing often followed, and
funding would dry up. This witch hunt against alternative practitioners
was in striking contrast to the Society's uncritical endorsement
of conventional toxic chemotherapy, despite increasing concern
that chemotherapy may not significantly improve survival rates
for most cancers. After an extensive review of clinical oncology
studies, for example, Dr. Ulrich Abel of the Institute of Epidemiology
and Biometry at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, concluded
that for most patients chemotherapy functions as little more than
a placebo, with an attendant decline in quality of life from the
toxic treatment. Excerpted from “The
High Stakes of Cancer Prevention” by Samuel Epstein
and Liza Gross, Tikkun Magazine, Nov/Dec 2000 www.Tikkun.org
CONTACT:
Samuel S. Epstein, M.D.
Cancer Prevention Coalition
University of Illinois at Chicago
School of Public Health
2121 W. Taylor St., MC 922
Chicago, IL 60612
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