Customer Reviews

Breast Cancer: Poisons, Profits and Preventions

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I lost my mother to breast cancer and a year later I got diagnoised with breast cancer. I began to do research as to the causes and this book is one of my favorites!! The author explaines the politics and pollution that contribute to cancer and names names. She also explains why the incidence of cancer contnues to grow. I tell people that they will never have a boring dinner conversation after reading this book. I think every person should have this book in their library.

I am a Federal Government-funded medical researcher (MD, PhD); I have never received a penny from chemical industries for my research. My speciality is breast cancer, especially focusing on effects of estrogens and environmental estrogenic chemicals on breast cancer, which is one of the major topics of this book. My scientific opinion that enviromental chemicals are likely to play significant roles in the eiology of breast cancer is consistent with the major emphasis of this book.

Notwithstanding, I was not impressed by this book. Different from several other good books on this kind of topics and geared to non-scientist readers, it was hard for me to find the orignal scientific or political articles that the author cited in this book, because of the lack of bibliography for the cited materials. This means that most of the readers will be forced to believe the author's citations without questions.

Unfortunately, I found the author's citations often questionable. For example, on page 36, it reads, "A study published in the June 7, 1996 Science (this is a name of a scientific journal) showed that combinations of these compounds can be up to 1,000 times as potent in producing breast cancer as the individual compounds." The article cited here is a famous one in this field (needless to say, I have it and read it many times), and I believe this citation is inappropriate, because (1) this article tested combinatorial effects of chemicals in engineered yeast cells but did not at all show any data regarding production of human breast cancers, and (2) this article was retracted by the authors in July, 1997, because of unexpected difficulty in reproducing their data by other scientists.

This book may be good for readers who want to know opinions of environmental activists, including the author, about the cause of breast cancer. However, I cannot recommend this book for serious readers who want to know about scientific, or factual, basis of the environmental effects on breast cancers.