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How are Chemical Companies Profiting from Tamoxifen drug? A Conflict
of Interest Story Q. Why doesn’t Breast Cancer Awareness
Month (NBCAM) include warnings about chemical carcinogens you
could avoid?
A. National Breast Cancer Awareness Month was conceived and funded
in 1984 by Imperial Chemical Industries, one of
the world’s
largest petrochemical manufacturers.
As the multimillion-dollar funder of Breast Cancer Awareness
Month, pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca influences every leaflet,
poster,
and commercial product produced by the 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, non-patented,
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 American Cancer Society
(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 Nov/Dec 2000 http://www.tikkun.org
CONTACT:
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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