Life's Delicate Balance
Causes and Prevention of Breast Cancer
by Janette D. Sherman, M.D.

Excerpts from Chapter 14
QUESTIONS, HISTORY, ETHICS AND MORALITY 
The global marketplace 

"I think it's time to redefine crime.  ...When corporate executives approve the dumping of pollution into the air or water, causing untold environmental damage and eventually killing thousands of people, that should be a crime. ...These corporate crimes should be listed as serious felonies, even more serious than the crimes committed by street criminals.  Why? Because, unlike many of the street criminals who violate the law because they're high on PCP or are so mentally gone that they can't find an honest way out of their predicament, the corporate criminal knows exactly what he is doing and why he is doing it.  His motive is pure greed. ...To me, that person is a thousand times more criminal and immoral than the crazy son of a bitch who stole my color TV."          -- Downsize This! -by Michael Moore

Mr. Moore says what needs to be said and says it in a way that leaves no doubt as to what constitutes crime.  While we are assaulted with stories of "crime in the streets" and treated nightly to the latest TV shooting or high-profile criminal trial, trans-national corporations do as they wish, polluting, selling dangerous products, not cleaning up their messes, and doing it mostly hidden from view behind the doors of board rooms, abetted by platoons of lawyers, public relations firms, paid-for public officials, and dysfunctional governments.

Why does the US, admittedly a world leader in wealth, personal comfort, industry, and armaments, have an epidemic of breast cancer?  Can it be that the answer lies within the question?

The cancer in our midst is a tragedy, needless, always painful, and inevitably a burden.  The burden is to the person with cancer, to her or his family, the community, and to society at large.  How much skill, talent, and energy do we lose as each person, one-by-one, struggles to over-come the silent invader?

The patterns of cancer point clearly to recognizable causes. Major causes involve products and processes, derived from economic and political factors.  Remedies are less clear.

If we continue to regulate chemicals one at a time, and grant to chemical companies the right to claim their product "innocent" until proven guilty beyond the shadow of a doubt, while ignoring the process inherent in the cancer epidemic, we are deceiving ourselves into believing that we will conquer cancer.  Nothing could be further form the truth.

The process that allows corporations to market chemicals for food production is inherently amiss.  Pesticides for crops, and drugs for food animals are tested under corporate control and out of the publics' sight.  Results of pesticide testing, when submitted to the EPA for "approval" become labeled "business confidentiality" and/or "unpublished."  Actually few people understand that pesticides are not approved by the EPA, but are registered for use. And registered, not based upon EPA testing, but upon corporate testing.

This is inherently the antithesis of a democracy: the right to the free flow of information.

The governmental and the legal process allow corporations to promote and market hormones, drugs and pesticides for crop and food animal use, with little-to-no-oversight or consideration of far reaching effects.  Even the simple measure of labeling dairy products as free from bovine growth hormone (rBGH) was discouraged. Conveniently the FDA action was written by attorney Michael Taylor who worked for Monsanto both before and after his tenure as an FDA official.  This kind of control gives little recourse to the consumer or farmer who chooses not to use such products.

...

The past five years have seen unprecedented mergers and buy-outs of already huge corporations-- in the name of control.  In the medical field, such massing of economic power portends dire consequences.  There is control of information so that products can be "targeted" to customers, and control of groups of identifiable "health care consumers."  That may be read as people with identifiable diseases that offer a potential "market" that can be targeted for "products."  There is a massing, in a few hands, of the control of production, distribution, and use of pharmaceutical drugs and appliances; control of the sale and use of medical and laboratory tests; the consolidation and control of hospitals, nursing homes, and home care providers.  We are no longer people who become sick.  We have become markets.  Is it any wonder that prevention receives so little attention?  Cancer is big and successful business!

There is control by our politicians and governmental agencies in the name of profit.  How else can one explain the 25 year hue and cry over the hazards of cigarettes with no definitive action? That was January 12, 1964 when Surgeon General Luther Terry said "the Government would act promptly 'without any foot-dragging,' to decide what can and should be done."  He continued:  "The Committee considers it more prudent from the public health viewpoint to assume that the established association has causative meaning than to suspend judgement until no uncertainty remains." In other words, he advocated the time-honored public health precept of the precautionary principle.

What action was taken by the 1994 Congressional hearings was stopped in its tracks by the tobacco company lawyers until a courageous employee finally blew the whistle, releasing information that had been hidden for years.  Despite stonewalling and legal maneuvers; the manipulation of cigarette ingredients; the targeting of sales to children; the insulting specter of seven men, the CEOs of tobacco companies, claiming "cigarettes are not addicting"; the facts finally have become public.  These seven tobacco men have yet to be called before a judicial body for lying to Congress and lying to the public.  To crown the whole sordid mess, a compliant Congress failed to pass legislation to control tobacco.  Public health, public ethics, and public morality fell before the power, money, manipulation and control of the tobacco industry.

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