Pinkwashing; Beware of Corporationss’ Pink-Ribbon Promises

By Kevin Lamb Staff Writer

From luxury cars to greeting cards, companies are using pink ribbons to repurpose deadly breast cancer into a marketing opportunity.

They sell pink M&Ms, pink corkscrews, pink Post-It Notes. Pink yoga mats, pink boxing gloves and pink SquarePants on a SpongeBob Beanie Baby. Happily, the pink-ribboned bagels, cranberry juice and toilet paper retain their usual colors.

In many cases, they’re saying fight breast cancer by buying products with chemicals that contribute to breast cancer. So many cosmetics contain carcinogens that the Breast Cancer Fund’s Campaign for Safe Cosmetics has obtained pledges from more than 500 companies to eliminate toxic ingredients from their body-care products. They’re listed at www.safecosmetics.org under "companies."

Even so, those carcinogens are everywhere. Led by Susan G. Komen for the Cure and the Silent Spring Institute, researchers identified 216 pervasive chemicals that cause breast tumors in animals. They’re in consumer products, food and air pollution. Besides shampoo, deodorant and cosmetics, they’re in furniture, drugs, meat, dairy, weed and bug killers, packaging and cleaning products.

When they’re sold with pink-ribbon promises to fight breast cancer, Breast Cancer Action calls it "pinkwashing."

"If they care as deeply as they say they do about women’s lives, they’ll clean up their products," said Executive Director Barbara Brenner. Her organization was the first to turn down all contributions from "pharmaceutical companies or any other corporations that profit from or contribute to the cancer epidemic."

Its "Think Before You Pink Campaign" urges people to ask how companies are ensuring their products aren’t part of the problem. B MW, for example, gives $1 to breast cancer charity for every test- drven mile, while its exhaust pipes depsit carcinogenic chemicals into the atmosphere.

Large contributions by Etee Lauder and Avon are connected to sales of cosmetics tha t contain parabens, chemical preservatives shown to mimic the function of natural estrogens. Those esrogenic compounds increase breast cancer risk by disrupting hormone function, especially during a gir l’s development from fetus through adolescence.

Other questions from the Pink campaign are how much money actually goes to the cause, which organization receives it and how i’s spent. Under Yoplait’s pink-lid pledge, for example, someone who eats three cups a day during the four-onth promotion will generate a ttal of $36.

Breast Cancer Awareness Month has become the model of patientadvocacy campaigns after more than 20 years, generating disproortionate amounts of funding to tr eat the disease and advise those who have it. But Fran Visco, presiden of the National Breast Cancer Coalition, worries about "lull(ing) the public into a false sense that adequate progress is being made."

"We don’t know how to prevent breast cancer," she said. "We don’t know how to detect it truly early. We don’t know how to cure it. And we don’t know enough about what puts us at risk for it."

The search for risks is quickly turning scientific attention toward estrogenics and other common chemical carcinogens. The University of Cincinnati’s "Growing Up Female" research project looks at environmental contributors to the rapidly dropping age of female puberty, which itself is a risk for later breast cancer.

Devra Lee Davis directs what the University of Pittsburgh calls its Center for Environmental Oncology. Her new book, "The Secret History of the War on Cancer," shows that scientists understood the cancer risks of synthetic hormones, Xrays and other things 70 years ago. She recommends a "truth and reconciliation commission" that would give those who make and sell carcinogenic products legal immunity in return for full disclosure about toxic hazards.

Conventional risk factors explain fewer than half of breast cancer cases. The Silent Spring researchers add living in an industrialized country to those risks, since it makes women five times more likely to get breast cancer. As estrogenics have become more ubiquitous since the 1970s, the chances a U.S. woman will develop it before dying have grown from 1 in 20 to 1 in 8.

It’s time to find out what exactly is causing all this, and what can be done about it, Davis said. "We’ve spent far too long detecting and treating the disease."

Contact this reporter at (937) 2252129 or klamb@DaytonDailyNews.com.

On the Web

Breast Cancer Action:

www.bcaction.org and www.thinkbeforeyoupink. org

Breast Cancer Fund:

www.breastcancerfund .org, and the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics at www.safecosmetics.org

The Environmental Working Group’s Skin Deep project

matches ingredients in nearly 25,000 products against 50 definitive toxicity and regulatory databases, making it the largest integrated data resource of its kind: www.cosmeticsdata base.com

Silent Spring Institute

has two large databases — with information on the 216 chemicals shown to cause breast cancer in animals, and with about 450 articles on human breast cancer studies: www.silentspring.org

Cancer Prevention Coalition’s goal is to make prevention the primary U.S. cancer policy: www.preventcancer.com

Did you know?…

Breast cancer killed 40,410

U.S. women in 2005. But lung cancer killed 81 percen t more, and cardiovascular disease killed 11 1 / 2 times as many.

In a given year, U.S. women are 61 percent as likely to be diagnosed with breast cancer as to have a heart attack.

The 1-in-8 lifetime risk of breast cancer means that if all women lived to be 85, that’s how many would develop it sometime.

Women younger than 40 had only 6 percent of new cases in 1996- 2000, but 16 percent of deaths.

Only 5-10 percent of breast cancers are caused by inherited gene mutations known to make women susceptible to it. Not everyone with those genes gets breast cancer.

Only about 20 percent of breast lumps are cancerous.

Aside from being a woman, the biggest risk factor is age. The median age of breast cancer death is 70 for white women and 61 for blacks.

Carcinogen testing not easy

When we read "there is no evidence" that a particular thing causes breast cancer, the Silent Spring Institute’s report says it usually means that thing hasn’t been studied. And with good reason. Environmental toxins can’t be tested through researchers’ preferred method of exposing some people to the substance, giving another group a placebo and then comparing the two.

Other issues make it necessary to use different protocols for testing suspected environmental carcinogens and other toxins:

- People are exposed to so many chemicals, it’s impossible to test the impact of just one.

- Even if that weren’t so, chemicals affect people differently in combinations than one at a time.

- The amount of exposure often isn’t as important as the timing.

- We can be affected by chemicals only our parents were exposed to if they changed genetic activity that we inherited. For example, high exposure to DDT before midadolescence led to a fivefold risk of breast cancer later, but the same exposure after that had no impact.

(c) 2007 Dayton Daily News. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.