Kathleen Killoy

October 24, 2006

October is breast cancer awareness month. Is it possible to justify allotting only a single month to breast cancer awareness when, in the United States, a woman's lifetime risk of breast cancer has tripled since 1960? What is it that accounts for the fact that half of all breast cancers occur in women who have no known risk factors for the disease, whereas less than 10 percent of breast cancers occur in women with a genetic predisposition? The truth is, our health suffers from our environment and breast cancer is not the only affliction that deserves its own month of awareness—unfortunately there aren't enough months in the year to go around.

The modern lifestyle is plagued with harmful chemicals, from well known toxins to new compounds with unknown affects. On a daily basis, we are exposed to hundreds of the more than 100,000 synthetic chemicals in use today, which accumulate in our bodies, creating a "chemical body burden." Over 90 percent of these chemicals have never been tested for their effects on human health. They exist in our homes, products, air, water, and food. They are present in all of us. While breast cancer rate increases are receiving much attention and exposure at this time, it is glaringly apparent that overall our nation's health is in serious decline.

As a result, the United States is going broke from health care costs. We currently spend twice as much, about two trillion dollars annually, on health care and medicine per person than any other industrialized nation in the world. Statistics reveal that in the United States someone files for bankruptcy resulting from a serious health problem every 30 seconds. Approximately 45 million Americans are without health care because they simply cannot afford to pay private insurance premiums. The problem is only going to get worse as we are exposed to more and more chemicals and fewer and fewer of us are able to afford health care. There are warnings that Medicare will go broke by the year 2019, and considering the latency periods of many cancers that will prove to be disastrous. The "body burden" problem needs to be addressed now and California is taking action.

California introduced Senate Bill 1379, which was signed on September 29, 2006. The bill provides for a bio-monitoring program, making California the first state in the country to monitor the toxins we're exposed to every day from thousands of consumer products. The state has made a major move towards unraveling the mystery behind our declining health as a whole and may prompt other states to follow suit. California has an opportunity to not only shed light on harmful levels of toxins but can address problems specific to California, like breast cancer clusters and other potential "hotspots". Summary reports of the findings will be released every two years starting in 2010. Testing won't be available to everyone, as there are significant costs involved and the logistics are still being considered. However, this is a positive step towards improving the health of our nation. In the meantime, until we can reap the benefits of large scale bio-monitoring, we need to educate ourselves as to the myriad toxins in our own lives and make every day of every month a day of prevention and "awareness."

For more information, please see the following sources:

Catherine Dodd, Opinion: Wearing Pink Ribbons is Not Enough, available at http://www.ucsf.edu/synapse/content/10506/pink.html

Lyanne Melendez, California First to Implement Bio-Monitoring, available at http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=health&id=4613627

National Geographic, "The Chemicals within Us," October 2006

Randall Fitzgerald, The Hundred Year Lie, 2006.