Last year I had the privilege of hearing ecologist Dr. Sandra Steingraber discuss the environmental links between cancer and reproductive health. She is the author of Living Downstream: An Ecologist’s Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment, which has also been made into a movie.
Steingraber is currently writing a series of essays on environmental health issues. In her latest essay, Escape from the Heartland—Atrazine, Susan G. Komen, and KFC, she weighs in on the damaging KFC/Susan G. Komen for the Cure Buckets for the Cure campaign:
When you are peddling fried chicken breasts in the name of addressing breast cancer, you are not only ignoring the role of diet in the breast cancer epidemic, you are distracting us from an ongoing battle about the use of a chemical possibly linked to breast cancer – atrazine – in the creation of that food.
Chickens are fed corn, and corn is sprayed with atrazine, and atrazine is a chemical that may be linked to breast cancer risk. Atrazine runs in the rivers and streams of Illinois and other states, falls in the rain over North America, and courses through the bloodstreams of children living in agricultural regions. We need to have a conversation about this. Don’t sell us fried fat and gravy. Come back to Peoria, Illinois, Susan G. Komen for the Cure, and talk about atrazine.
Steingraber is absolutely right to call out Komen as well as KFC on this issue. Komen takes far too many contributions from companies whose products have been linked to cancer, something I’ve written about numerous times before. The President’s Cancer Panel’s recent study calling the alarm about the impact of cancer-causing chemicals on our health should be a wake up call, but it is interesting to note that the ink was barely dry before the American Cancer Society, also the recipient of huge amounts of money from companies that add to our chemical load, was insisting that the Panel’s conclusions were alarmist (and obviously bad news for many of their corporate contributors).
That line of reasoning needs to be rebutted and Steingraber’s expertise on this subject is yet another wake up call about business as usual in the American cancer industry. You can read more of her excellent essays here. Steingraber offers crucial expertise on a subject she knows all too well from personal experience and is an important voice that we need to be hearing.
Lauren Griffith had put off getting a mammogram for four years until last May, when she walked into a mobile clinic on the backside at Churchill Downs.
The free exam, provided in part by First Lady Jane Beshear’s Horses and Hope initiative, caught a tumor that led to a full mastectomy, said Griffith, 51, a security guard at Gate 5.
“I am the poster child for Horses and Hope,” she said. “I am the first cancer diagnosed through this program at Churchill.”
Griffith, of Louisville, is among the 213 horse track employees across the state who have received a free mammogram as part of Beshear’s two-year-old initiative.
(Beshear) said Horses and Hope has raised $161,000 for awareness efforts and mammograms, educated 146,844 race fans and 1,119 track employees through its “Pink Out” days and detected cancer in two backside workers, including Griffith.
Churchill pledges a dollar to Susan G. Komen for the Cure, a national cancer awareness and research group, for every ticket sold to the Oaks and a dollar to Horses and Hope for every “Lilly” drink sold that day, a concoction named for the garland given to the Oaks winner. So far, those two efforts have produced $130,000.
Beshear, Sorrell and Griffith all said the focus on backside workers is significant because many are uninsured or underinsured and are from poorer countries where breast cancer awareness is nonexistent.“Many of them have never had a mammogram, ever; don’t even know what it is,” Griffith said.
Churchill Downs spokesman John Asher said the track has been pleased with the program.“They have pretty solid evidence they’ve saved some lives, especially in this industry, especially the segment of the racing population it targets,” he said. “It’s really been a tremendous thing for those people.” (emphasis mine)
Although the current focus is on backside workers, Beshear said she hopes to expand the program to other track workers, such as cooks and betting window clerks.
I was out running some errands yesterday and it occurred to me that it was simply impossible to walk into any major retail establishment these days without seeing something with a pink ribbon on it for sale. The car repair place, the electronics store, the grocery–EVERYWHERE. It is impossible not to be aware and darn near possible not to ‘show your support’ by buying some pink thingy where a few cents on the dollar will go for “The Cure”. So once again, as I’ve said so many times before–we are aware that an awful lot of corporations are making out like bandits pinkwashing their merchandise, and we are going broke paying for absurdly expensive cancer drugs because our health insurance gets cut off if we get breast cancer and what is needed is to work on identifying the cause so we can more accurately treat this disease, not more shot in the expensive dark ‘cures’.
And sure as hell, providing mammograms on the backside of the Downs is no substitute for comprehensive health care for ‘those’ people.
Fair warning, this post should probably be sub-titled “Women’s Health Care, How Much More Seriously Effed Up Can It Possibly Get”…
You would be in good company for instance if you thought Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) was no longer routinely considered an option for women going through menopause after we found out that when we quit taking it, breast cancer rates immediately fell–think again–Martha Rosenberg vivisects the New York Times for revisiting it as a medically acceptable option here.
And funny story, seems that never mind that we just spent how many months passing a watered down health care bill that was supposed to solve all our ills–getting and keeping health insurance while female is still some sort of Kafka-like joke.
WellPoint CEO Angela Braly got a 51% raise last year and now has a compensaton package that totals more than $13 million according to the LA Times.
Got breast cancer, kiss your health insurance goodbye. Via Reuters:
One after another, shortly after a diagnosis of breast cancer, each of the women learned that her health insurance had been canceled…
…None of the women knew about the others. But besides their similar narratives, they had something else in common: Their health insurance carriers were subsidiaries of WellPoint, which has 33.7 million policyholders — more than any other health insurance company in the United States.
The women all paid their premiums on time. Before they fell ill, none had any problems with their insurance. Initially, they believed their policies had been canceled by mistake.
They had no idea that WellPoint was using a computer algorithm that automatically targeted them and every other policyholder recently diagnosed with breast cancer. The software triggered an immediate fraud investigation, as the company searched for some pretext to drop their policies, according to government regulators and investigators.
Once the women were singled out, they say, the insurer then canceled their policies based on either erroneous or flimsy information.
Read the whole story, it gets much, much worse. I particularly found this quote illuminating:
“It’s not like these companies don’t like women because they are women,” says Jeff Isaacs, the chief assistant Los Angeles City Attorney who runs the office’s 300-lawyer criminal division. “But there are two things that really scare them and they are breast cancer and pregnancy. Breast cancer can really be a costly thing for them. Pregnancy is right up there too. Their worst-case scenario is that a child will be born with some disability and they will have to pay for that child’s treatment over the course of a lifetime.”
No really, that is pretty much the same as hating women, at least until men start giving birth. Pissed off (and if you aren’t, what the hell is wrong with you)? Tell WellPoint what you think here.
Before we leave the subject of breast cancer profiteering, our friends at Breast Cancer Action are none too happy at Kentucky Fried Chicken’s form letter response to their protest of the KFC Buckets for the Cure pink-washing campaign. The response from KFC read in part,
“You should know that our partnership with KFC is designed to help reach millions of women we might not otherwise reach with breast health education and awareness messages which we consider critical to our mission. This additional outreach is made possible through KFC’s 5,300 restaurants (about 900 of them in communities not yet served by a Komen Affiliate).”
Breast Cancer Action’s awesome reply addresses the huge inequities in health and health care that exist because of poverty in this country, saying that KFC has:
targeted underserved communities whose residents often struggle to stretch their food dollars and are dependent on cheap meals. If you want to serve underserved communities, work with the community health clinics, economic development corporations, and community coalitions that are working to reverse the damage KFC and others have done.
KFC and other fast food restaurants are disproportionately located in low-income communities (especially those of color) for very specific reasons.
Low-income neighborhoods are underserved by grocery stores with healthier options, and therefore are “prime real estate” for fast food restaurants that provide inexpensive, already prepared options. Faced with a lack of options, these already vulnerable communities are prey to large companies like KFC that offer the least amount of nutrition for the most profit.
In response to KFC’s claim that the campaign focuses on healthy diet choices such as grilled, not fried chicken, Breast Cancer Action declares bullshit:
By placing the responsibility for our crisis in diet on the consumer, they reveal a disturbing lack of insight and understanding related to social inequities in this country. This is shameful.
In addition, the claim that the partnership focuses on healthy options is outrageous. A menu with one or two salads does not a “focus” make! And it is equally outrageous that they claim to be educating people to make healthy food choices by encouraging them to eat at a fried chicken franchise.
KFC is currently embroiled in a suit related to their chicken’s high levels of PhIP, a byproduct of the grilling process listed on the state of California’s list of carcinogens. While there is much that isn’t known about PhIP- Komen’s representative acknowledged that the NCI has not established safe or unsafe levels for its consumption- it seems both ridiculous and unethical to frame the breast cancer epidemic as something “curable” through repeated consumption of these ingredients. And in terms of prevention, we cannot imagine feeding people carcinogenic grilled chicken that raises the risk of heart disease and breast cancer and then expect them not to become sick.
Returning now to health care reform and the small issue of whether or not you can get affordable health care insurance in the first place, remember gender ratings–weren’t they supposed to be a thing of the past once we passed health care reform? Maybe….eventually…
In the meantime, not to worry, Sue Lowden, a would-be challenger against Sen. Harry Reid in Nevada suggests that you can always barter for health care with chickens:
(Note: For a hilarious response to Lowden that tells you how many chickens it will cost for your particular ailment, click here.)
…And it is worth noting the the current wave of laws at the state and federal level and the general level of hysteria around women’s rights to choose pregnancy and childbirth in the United States has a lot to do with control over their bodies…
…It is also worth watching how well this app does elsewhere in the world. I am not kidding. Yesterday, for example, a story on Apple’s first-quarter profits indicated that sales of the iPhone and iPad are booming in places like China, India, Pakistan and elsewhere. These are cultures in which women’s periods are indeed more openly the source of control (here, we like to pretend we are protecting “life,” not controlling women’s lives.
Taken by themselves, every one of these stories is deeply troubling and messed up. While the profit opportunities (even with health care reform) abound, the reality is that our commodified health care system is damaging and too often deadly, especially for women. Despite all the health care debate ruckus of the last year, we have accomplished very little. Much, much more remains to be done, and the only starting point from which that can be accomplished is one that sees the health care of all as a human right, not a commodity that can be bought and sold. And as of yet, there is no app for that.
Has pink cause marketing gone too far? Breast Cancer Action thinks so! KFC’s “Buckets for the Cure” campaign achieves a new low in pinkwashing – selling pink buckets of greasy fast food in order to help “create a world without breast cancer.” BCA fails to understand how pink buckets of chicken will help end the breast cancer epidemic. We encourage people to ask critical questions before purchasing pink products that claim to donate money to breast cancer research or prevention. Be an informed consumer!
Many thanks to Kim and Breast Cancer Action for weighing in, I have thought for a long time that their approach to addressing breast cancer is far healthier and productive than the ‘awareness’ approach. For more information on pink-washing, check out their Think Before You Pink website.
And because you just have to see it to believe it, here is a picture of the KFC down the road from me that wasn’t content with just having pink buckets, they painted their whole darned restaurant pink. Incidentally, the price for the buckets is the same as their regular prices. So if you buy a 6-piece bucket for $9.98, 50 cents of that will go to Susan G. Komen for the Cure. In other words 5% of your purchase, and if you get the $20.99 size that works out less than 2.5% of your purchase. Not such a YUM!my deal (sorry, I’ll stop with the oh so tempting wordplay). Why not just send the full amount to Breast Cancer Action or the cause of your choice, it will do more good and you’ll be healthier.
A few weeks ago I posted some interesting analysis from Steve Kass on the difference between death rates and survival rates when it comes to looking at breast cancer. Last week FactCheck.org ran an excellent piece debunking an ad that ran before the healthcare vote which mangled breast cancer statistics in a fear-mongering anti-reform pitch. Their reasoning also looks at the difference between survival and mortality rates:
As for breast cancer survival rates, early screening certainly improves those. What’s less clear is whether screening actually improves survival, versus improving the statistics we use to measure it. We’ve written about this a few times before — including in our analysis of a previous misleading ad featuring Walsh.
Walsh’s claim that survival rates for breast cancer are notably higher in the U.S. than in the E.U. is backed up by a study published in the medical journal Lancet, which showed five-year relative survival rates of 83.9 percent in the U.S. and 73.1 percent for the European average. Five-year relative survival rates show the number of cancer patients who are still alive five years after diagnosis, compared with how many people would be expected to be alive in a healthy population. That means that early detection will always improve the five-year relative survival rate — more patients will be alive five years after diagnosis if their cancer is caught early in its course, regardless of whether they ultimately die from the disease. Breast cancer mortality rates — the number of people who died from breast cancer within a given period — are remarkably similar in the U.S. and the U.K., which recommends mammograms every three years starting at age 50.
We talked to a number of experts for our previous article who said that mortality rates were a more accurate statistic for comparing disease outcomes of different countries. The USPSTF’s conclusion is that the improvement in breast cancer outcomes from yearly mammograms starting at age 40 doesn’t outweigh the potential harm associated with the test, mostly harm from potential false positives. Mortality rate comparisons back up that assessment, and survival rate comparisons don’t necessarily challenge it.
Point taken–statistics don’t lie, but the way they are manipulated can be dangerously misleading.
the role of diet in the breast cancer epidemic, you are distracting us from an ongoing battle about the use of a chemical possibly linked to breast cancer – atrazine – in the creation of that food.
hand, 
