Report: cause for 'alarm' on possible work-related causes of breast cancer

Jim Morris
Updated

A new summary of the science makes a strong case for occupational links to breast cancer and calls on Congress, regulators and researchers to pay more attention to chemical exposures and other risk factors.

“Working Women and Breast Cancer: The State of the Evidence,” is the product of more than two years of work overseen by the San Francisco-based Breast Cancer Fund. A panel of experts reviewed scientific studies, most published in the past 25 years, and found ties between the disease and exposures to solvents; pesticides; tobacco smoke; ionizing radiation and other toxic materials. There also was an association with night shift work.

“Research is inadequate, but there is enough to raise alarm about women’s work, occupational exposures and breast cancer,” the report concludes. “At the same time, policies are insufficient to protect worker health.”

The report touches on a subject raised by the Center for Public Integrity’s “Unequal Risk” project, launched in June. The series noted that enforceable workplace exposure limits for many toxic substances don’t exist, and those that have been set by the Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration in most cases aren’t protective. As the Breast Cancer Fund put it, “women and men in the workplace are routinely exposed to levels of chemicals that would not be allowed in their homes. The relatively lax requirements of some occupational settings lead to both higher levels and longer exposure periods than would otherwise occur in a residential or commercial setting.”

Among the report’s recommendations:

In 2012, the Center published a story about high rates of breast cancer among female workers in Canada’s automotive plastics industry. The story reported the results of a six-year study that found the women were almost five times as likely to develop the disease, prior to menopause, as women in a control group.

The workers had been exposed to a variety of solvents, heavy metals, flame retardants and the hardening agent bisphenol A, used in polycarbonate water bottles and other products. “A lot of these chemicals should be removed from the workplace,” breast cancer survivor Sandy Knight, who worked at two Ontario plastics plants from 1978 to 1998, told the Center.

Click here to read this story at the Center for Public Integrity

This story is part of Unequal Risk. Workers in America face risks from toxic exposures that would be considered unacceptable outside the job. Click here to read more stories in this blog.

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Copyright 2015 The Center for Public Integrity. This story was published by The Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative news organization in Washington, D.C.