Wendy Mesley, the Gemini-winning CBC journalist and host of the network's investigative consumer show 'Marketplace', has been diagnosed with breast cancer and has been asking questions about our rising cancer rates. A result of her exploration was the program "Chasing the Cancer Answer" which aired on March 5th. The CBC received over a thousand emails after the first airing and scheduled several repeat airings.

Wendy believed she was doing everything right by following the Canadian Cancer Society's Seven Steps to Health, but she came to realize that something else must be going on. Many of the cancers with rising rates have environmental links, but with so much focus on treatment, drugs, and finding the ever-elusive cancer cure, very little research is devoted to primary prevention.

Common sense tells us that we are what we eat, what we breathe and what we expose our bodies to in our day-to-day lives. For most of us, that includes a lifetime exposure to industrial chemicals, pollutants and pesticides. The group known as Environmental Defence (www.environmentaldefence.ca/protecting/toxicnation.htm) tested the blood and urine samples of 11 men and women volunteers and found a total of 88 chemicals, including PCBs, flame retardants and insecticides. These contaminants are known and suspected carcinogens or other chemicals that could cause a range of problems. It is not known at what level a chemical becomes toxic to people, but the fact that we carry contaminants in our blood is telling.

Each of us likely has pollutants in our blood and there is little we can do to prevent more of the same until government tackles the problem and explicit labelling warns us about known carcinogens in food, cosmetics, personal care and household products. Patients should also be better informed of the carcinogenic risks of prescription drugs and screening and diagnostic medical procedures.

Dr. James Holland is an oncologist and chemotherapy researcher. When he spoke with Wendy Mesley, he admitted that there is so little being done in cancer prevention compared to cancer treatment because there's no economic incentive in it.

BCAM's goal from the beginning, in 1991, was to push the research and action agenda from treatment to prevention. BCAM's first big public lecture in March of 1992 presented Dr. Richard Margolese debating Adriane Fugh-Berman about the tamoxifen prevention trial. Our second big public event, in 1994, featured Judy Brady, Devra Lee Davis and John Bailar discussing environmental chemicals and breast cancer. At the time, very few people — certainly no other breast cancer groups — were raising these issues.

BCAM is a pioneer among Canadian breast cancer groups discussing environmental chemicals and breast cancer. We have yet to witness other breast cancer groups come on board. What is encouraging is the greater acceptance by the larger community of the connection between environmental and toxic chemicals and cancer and other health concerns.

For many years BCAM's appeals for more research into primary prevention and cleaning up environmental contaminants were like a cry in the wilderness. Now that a personality like Wendy Mesley has gone public with essentially the same message, perhaps governments and researchers will sit up and take notice.