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.
