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New Breast Cancer Prevention Guide Available for Download!

Environmental Exposure:
A new focus for breast cancer prevention

In March of this year, Denmark became the first country in the world to provide workers compensation to women whose breast cancer was related to occupational exposures. The 37 women affected were mostly nurses and airline attendants who had worked night shift for many years, which exposed them continually to light at night and disrupted their natural body rhythms.

The light-at-night factor is one of the many environmental and occupational links to breast cancer discussed in Toxic Free Canada’s new publication, Environmental Exposure: the CancerSmart guide to breast cancer prevention, which was released today. Like the organization’s popular CancerSmart Consumer Guide, Environmental Exposure looks at the many environmental factors that contribute to breast cancer and offers prevention strategies, including avoiding carcinogenic products and reducing exposures in the workplace.

Breast cancer awareness campaigns have put billions into cancer research and have significantly reduced the number of people who die from the disease. But breast cancer rates remain stubbornly high and more than half of all cases can’t be explained by the established risk factors.

"For years breast cancer programs have focused on care and treatment and often haven’t even recognized many of the environmental and occupational causes of cancer," said Toxic Free Canada executive director Mae Burrows. "Publications like Environmental Exposure put a spotlight on environmental exposures and provide Canadians — as well as their governments and health agencies — with ways to prevent breast cancer."

Produced with funding from the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation, the 24-page guide looks at the latest peer-reviewed research and identifies key environmental links to breast cancer. Among them are hormone replacement therapy, pesticides, industrial solvents, diesel exhaust and estrogenic chemicals in common consumer products, including the now-familiar bisphenol-A. In addition to offering ways to reduce exposure and find alternative products, the guide looks at prevention strategies in the workplace and policy directions that governments should take to enhance breast cancer prevention.

Environmental Exposure was researched and written by Sean Griffin, who is also author of CancerSmart 3.0: The Consumer Guide. It can be downloaded from http://www.toxicfreecanada.ca/pdf/Breast-cancer-guide-TFC-2009.pdf Print copies are also available on request.

For more information or to arrange an interview with the author:

• Sean Griffin 604.785.6771
• Claudia Ferris 604.328.8646
• Mae Burrows 604.526-1956
  604.916-9026 (cell)