Breast Cancer and Environmental Factors

My mother was diagnosed with breast cancer when I was in my junior year of high school.  Since then I have become fascinated with the relationship between the environment and the development of cancer.  In a class I took last year with Maureen Hays-Mitchell, Gender, Justice, and Environmental Change, we studied DDT the resulting health effects from exposure.  We read many articles that looked deeper than direct exposure effects, and instead studied the chemical's seepage into the soil, agriculture products, and water, extending its potential effects the first generation of individuals exposed.  These chemicals often mimic estrogen, possibly causing premature puberty and breast cancer.  Looking up research now, it seems that it has been very difficult to fully study the effects of DDT on the contraction of breast cancer. A study conducted by the Public Health Institute states: "More than 20 studies of serum "DDT" and breast cancer have found little support for the hypothesis that exposure influences risk of breast cancer. However, studies share common limitations including the inability to account for exposure in early life when the breast may be most vulnerable and the inability to measure exposure to the primary components of commercial DDT"  (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20965245).  


Breast cancer is the second leading cause of cancer deaths in women, following lung cancer, but the causes are still unknown. In terms of environmental conditions that increase risk, "one's personal health habits (i.e. smoking, bad eating habits, not enough exercise) as well as different forms of radiation, pollutants, pesticides and toxic chemicals in the environment surrounding us. Scientists think that environmental agents like these are the cause of about three quarters of the cancer cases" (http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/biology/b103/f00/web2/robbin2.html).  The Silent Spring Institute conducted a study on women living in Newton, MA who had a high rate of breast cancer.  Researchers found that most of the women, because their socioeconomic class, used lawn care services, exterminators, dry cleaners, and other services that introduce toxins into the home and body.

Fausto-Sterling mentioned that there is a concern that the presence of environmental pollutants that mimic estrogen have begun to cause widespread increases in the incidence of intersex forms such as hypospadias.  Just as hormone injections during pregnancy to prevent intersex babies seems unnatural and potentially severely damaging for the child in the future, the alteration of the sex of a baby through foreign chemicals to which we are exposed without our knowledge or wariness of the risk is unnerving and scary.  For me, it represents the efforts of humans to control and alter nature, either through chemicals on their lawns or hormone injections in a pregnant woman, in a way that is not meant to occur and in some cases puts human safety and health at risk.