Media Release – From Pink to Prevention | Tipping Point North South

A new campaign on breast cancer: environment, occupation & obstacles to getting both of these risk factors taken seriously in the breast cancer debate

FROM PINK to PREVENTION is a new breast cancer campaign that exposes the barriers to achieving ‘primary prevention’ – stopping the disease before it starts. Central to our campaign is one big fundamental question we seek to put to all those individuals, organisations and institutions with the power to make or to influence decisions affecting public and occupational health in general and breast cancer incidence in particular.

We want government, the chemicals industry, public health agencies, cancer charities, the cancer establishment, cancer and science research bodies, the breast cancer industry, big pharma, trade unions, and the entire corporate pink-driven industry to explain to all women who have had, who now have and who will have breast cancer, why they persist in refusing to acknowledge the role of environmental and occupational toxins and other factors of influence such as shift work, in breast cancer and why they persist in ignoring decades of scientific evidence up to the present day – from organisations such as the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the European Union (EU) and many other respected scientific bodies – on which the link between our lifelong (womb to grave) exposures to toxins and the escalating incidence of breast cancer, among many other diseases, is based?

Over the decades, we and many others have been asking questions such as this and still await a satisfactory answer. We are deeply concerned about the consistent pushing of lifestyle factors as the main culprit behind the rising incidence of the disease. We are totally mystified as to why primary prevention is ignored in favour of addressing the 30% – 50% of breast cancer cases thought to be linked to our lifestyle – leaving 50-70% of cases unanswered.

We cannot understand why the environmental and occupational links to breast cancer have been totally marginalised.

We argue that the barriers to prevention – acceptance, confusion, fixation, ignorance, procrastination, invisibility, fear and vested interests – play a huge role in barring progress on primary prevention. We see the ‘pink’ takeover of breast cancer as aiding and abetting these barriers since fundraising has become the predominant ‘pink-driven’ focus for the public. Fundraising is good – but not when it displaces other, equally vital elements of the debate.

Not when it displaces primary prevention.

We are convinced that it is by asking this one big fundamental question and by revealing the barriers to the advancement of prevention policies and strategies for breast cancer (and many other diseases with proven links to environmental and occupational toxins), that we can help to build public awareness and support for the knowledge-based, people-before-profit, ethically sound and beneficial to people and environment changes we urgently need to see enacted from those with power and position to make them happen.
Join us, help us, support us, like us and follow us, and help us overcome the barriers and get an answer to the big question.

NOTES
1. About us
From Pink to Prevention is a new initiative formed by Deborah Burton from Tipping Point North South, Helen Lynn and Diana Ward of the Working Group on Primary Prevention of Breast Cancer. It draws on our campaigning expertise over the past two decades in raising public, media and political attention to the issues of environmental and occupational links to cancer – especially breast cancer
2. Links for further information