Oil Changes For The Cure

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Oct 092011
 

Before I write another word, I feel a need to apologize.  What you are about to see is about taking care of your car and curing cancer all at the same time and it is pink.  Very pink.  It  started with a banner ad that popped up on a website I was looking at this morning:

There is little I like less than companies who make things that are linked with cancer (such as car exhaust) making money on breast cancer cause branding and I couldn’t figure out how getting a $10 dollar rebate on a very pricey oil change was going to cure breast cancer, so much against my better judgement,  I clicked the ad.

Which led to this:

Wow, did they just up the ante on possibly the pinkest car ad ever?  Forget the oil change, now they are suggesting we have to buy a whole car?  Still not a word on how this fights breast cancer.  So I decided to go googling and found this:

Join the fight against Breast Cancer | Washington, MI

The copy below the banner reads,

When you submit a service rebate for service performed in October, you can help change a woman’s life when you elect to waive some or all of your eligible rebate(1). Whether it’s $5, $10 or $25. Chevrolet will contribute the money to the American Cancer Society®(2). Join Chevrolet in the fight against breast cancer.

Talk about generosity–if we buy their overpriced service, they will send our money to ACS.  Not one word about an actual donation from Chevrolet itself.

You can contact Chevrolet here and tell them what you think of their self-serving, ungenerous, pink-washed ad campaign here.  Chevrolet owes an apology to everyone who has ever had breast cancer and while we’re at it, a plan to cut cancer causing auto emissions.

—–

Chevy isn’t the only automaker to run campaigns like this.  I had to get new windshield wipers awhile back and the guy at the Toyota service center told me that half of the purchase price for the wipers would go to breast cancer.  I started loudly saying that I was opposed to companies that make cancer producing products doing this sort of cause branding and I’d prefer to buy the wipers at half the price.  Which they quickly agreed to if for no other reason than to get me to shut up. Of course half the price is what the wipers should have been in the first place, not the jacked up price that forces the customer to be generously overcharged so that the company looks like it cares.

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 Posted by Fempeace on October 9, 2011

Pink-Washed Profits

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Oct 022011
 

I had harbored a fantasy of enjoying at least one day of October before getting irritated by the Pepto pink bombardment of National Breast Cancer Awareness Month merchandising.  Alas, this was not to be  While the usefulness of suggesting that we all be aware of breast cancer is questionable (as in seriously, how can you not be aware), the lucrative cause-branding that goes with it is an unquestionable abomination and the ad circulars which were tucked into my Saturday morning Washington Post were tricked out in pink to the max.  Perhaps the worst was a multi-page Proctor&Gamble ad:

How Much Are You Really Donating?

P&G offers three ways to “give”–if you use one of the coupons, they’ll donate $.02.  If you spend $50, they’ll rebate you $10 and donate $10, and (they may regret this one) if you ‘like’ their Facebook page, they’ll give $.10 to the National Breast Cancer Foundation (NCBF), which funds mammograms for women who can’t afford them and research (although I couldn’t figure out research into what on their webpage).  Not my choice of the best way to address breast cancer, but for the sake of using this as a math problem, let’s say that donating to them is a good idea.

So off you go to your favorite store and buy Olay Regenerist Moisturizer which costs about $19.00 (quick price check on drugstore.com) and use the $3.00 coupon.  You spend $16.00, but how much of it goes to P&G and how much goes towards something breast cancer related?  Bottom line for NBCF–$.02  Bottom line for P&G–$15.98.  Now if you buy two moisturizers and something else that costs $10.00, then you spend  $40.00 after the rebate and NBCF gets $10.00.  But P&G is still the big winner with $30.00.  So mostly your hard earned cash has gone to enrich the coffers of P&G, not to a good cause.

The point is this, just because it is pink doesn’t mean it is helpful–yes it is good that corporations give to good causes, but let’s be clear that it is very, very profitable for them to do so.  If you really want to give money to address breast cancer, do some research, decide what organization is doing the most important work and send them a check unless you really were going to buy the moisturizer anyway (and if so, check to be sure that the products in it aren’t toxic or carcinogenic because it really blows how many companies use products like this to pinkwash themselves).

__________

PS–please feel free to share links to any pink offenders you may run across–let’s help call these boob sponging profiteers out.

 

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 Posted by Fempeace on October 2, 2011

Tell Eli Lilly It Is Time To Stop Milking Cancer

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Sep 242009
 

Perhaps one of the most insidious things about about breast cancer and how we treat it is that some of the same companies that produce drugs to treat this disease also produce products that have been linked to or shown to cause cancer.  This year, Breast Cancer Action’s Think Before You Pink campaign targets one of those companies, Eli Lilly,

“the sole manufacturer of rBGH — the artificial growth hormone given to dairy cows that increases people’s risk of cancer. Eli Lilly also manufactures breast cancer treatment medications and a pill that “reduces the risk” of breast cancer.”

Please take a moment and let Eli Lilly know that Milking Cancer is not acceptable and needs to stop.

Note:  Eli Lilly is certainly not the only company that profits from both sides of the cancer fence.  See more here about  Novartis and Astra Zeneca, two other companies that engage in this despicable practice.

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 Posted by Fempeace on September 24, 2009

Atrazine And Breast Cancer–A Profitable Fait Accompli?

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Aug 272009
 

A report released earlier this week by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) sounded the alarm about the pervasive presence of the pesticide Atrazine in our waterways.  As the NRDC points out,

The effects associated with atrazine have been documented extensively. Reproductive effects have been seen in amphibians even at low levels of exposure. Concentrations as low as 0.1 ppb, for example, have been shown to alter the development of sex characteristics in male frogs, resulting in male frogs with female sex characteristics and the presence of eggs in male frog testes. Some scientists are concerned about exposure for children and pregnant women, as small doses could impact development of the brain and reproductive organs. Research has also raised concerns about atrazine’s “synergistic” affects, showing potential for the chemical having a multiplier affect to increase toxic affects of other chemical co-contaminants in the environment.

Atrazine has been classified by the EPA as an endocrine disruptor and according to the Breast Cancer Fund,

Atrazine has been shown to cause mammary cancer in lab rats. Recent data suggest that the major mechanism by which atrazine exerts its endocrine disrupting effects is by increasing the activity of the enzyme aromatase. Aromatase facilitates the conversion of testosterone and other androgens to estrogens, including estradiol.

Apparently, this pathway of estrogen production is of great enough importance to the development of breast cancer that a current class of breast cancer drugs aims to block this activity of aromatase. Femara (Letrozole) is one of these drugs. It knocks out aromatase, which in turn reduces estrogen and keeps breast cancer cells from growing initially.

The maker of atrazine is Syngenta, a multi-national agrichemical corporation. Syngenta was formed in 2000, when another multi-national called Novartis merged their Crop Protection and Seeds businesses with Astra Zeneca’s Agrochemicals. What is interesting and very disturbing, he argues, is that Novartis is also the producer of Femara, the breast cancer drug discussed above.

Got that?  Novartis both sells a chemical that is linked to the development of breast cancer and sells a drug that is used to treat breast cancer.  Ditto Astra Zeneca which makes Tamoxifen and is the founding sponsor of National Breast Cancer Awareness Month.  Mighty damned convenient to use one of your products to produce a need for another of your products.  And very, very profitable.

I’ve lost count of the times I have written about this, but particularly in light of the current healthcare debate, it is a crucial point: 

We will not ‘cure’ breast cancer until we quit causing it.

Not only do companies that produce cancer-causing products commit grievous harm to the health and lives of too many people, they contribute significantly to the cost of healthcare.  If we are truly serious about improving our health, and lowering the costs of maintaining it, we need to confront the sickening dichotomy between profit and the common good.

And yes, I used that pepto-pink font for a reason–National Breast Cancer Awareness Month is a little more than a month away–we are more than aware of this disease already–this year let’s quit with the cutesy pink already and insist that addressing the cause become an integral part of finding a cure.

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 Posted by Fempeace on August 27, 2009