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Promise Me No Harmful Chemicals: Breast Cancer Group Calls for Greater Accountability in Fundraising
How would you react if you learned that a prominent women’s health organization commissioned a perfume that contains chemicals with demonstrated negative health effects?
Would you tell your friends about the potential dangers? Register your concerns with the organization?
Would you be outraged enough to raise a stink?
When Breast Cancer Action (BCAction) learned that Susan G. Komen for the Cure’s (Komen) commissioned pink ribbon perfume, Promise Me, contains harmful chemicals, we asked Komen to immediately recall the fragrance. When they refused, we went public. We’re raising a stink because women’s health has to come first.
Two of the chemicals that independent lab testing found in Promise Me are Galaxolide and Toluene. Galaxolide is a synthetic musk that works as a hormone disruptor and has been detected in blood, breast milk, and even newborns. Toluene is a potent neurotoxicant that is linked to a variety of negative health effects and is widely known as one of the Toxic Trio. Toluene has even been banned by the International Fragrance Association. According to the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics and Environmental Working Group’s report “Not So Sexy: The Health Risks of Secret Chemicals in Fragrance,“ a person’s exposure to hormone disruptors is linked to a variety of health problems, including increased risk of breast cancer and reproductive toxicity.
Through our Think Before You Pink® campaign, which was started in 2002 in response to the overwhelming number of pink ribbon products on the market, BCAction calls for greater transparency and accountability by corporations or organizations that take part in breast cancer fundraising. That includes Komen, the giant of the breast cancer movement. We call out pinkwashers (a term we coined in 2002) which are companies or organizations that claim to care about breast cancer by promoting a pink ribbon product while at the same time produce, manufacture, and/or sell products that are linked to the disease. Komen is pinkwashing with Promise Me, there’s no doubt about it.
How can Komen get away with commissioning this harmful product? Easy – the federal government poorly regulates cosmetics and personal care products. Manufacturers are not required to get approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) before putting cosmetic products and ingredients on the market. Even more troubling, the FDA lacks the authority to issue recalls of unsafe cosmetic products. These gaps in U.S. cosmetics regulation mean that the burden of keeping products safe falls on the manufacturers themselves (whose main job is to make money) or on consumers (who would have to spend hours reading ingredient labels to ensure that the products they buy are free of chemicals).
It’s time for a new standard that shifts the burden of proof to manufacturers. By creating healthier products, manufacturers can reduce our exposure to harmful chemicals. But we know it doesn’t come easy. It takes action – only through holding corporations and organizations to the highest possible standard will women’s health come first.
Join BCAction in urging Komen to recall Promise Me perfume from store shelves and peoples’ homes. Ask them to make good on their vision of “a world without breast cancer.” Send a letter now to Komen leadership – and demand that they take every precaution to protect women’s health.
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15 Comments so far
Show AllOur health care system - all symbols, and ribbons and show. Nothng against the participants, who feel they are helping. But it is an industry for the "charitable" organizations running the events, and not a serious way to address health care.
Joe, have you seen the posters in NYC -- The Scar: Breast Cancer is Not a Pink Ribbon?
The reality is devastating, and can't be whisked away by a pink ribbon, or any other symbol -- as you stated in your post!
http://thescarproject.org/
Barbara Ehrenreich has spoken out about breast cancer, a disease of which she knows more than she would like to know:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/jan/02/cancer-positive-thinking-barbara-ehrenreich
This is one of the most important issues of our times. It's all very well to promote cancer research in terms of treatment modalities. But unless the environmental factors that have contributed to the precipitous rise in cancer are confronted, rates will continue to rise.
Of course corporations don't want to acknowledge this. They would much rather have us contributing toward a 'cure', if such a thing can be said to exist.
To acknowledge that environmental releases of chemicals contributes to human cancer rates is one of the third rails of US politics. There are billions of dollars in the chemical industries.
But confronting the powers that be, and the human and environmental consequences of estrogen-mimicking chemicals, must be done.
HYMENAEA: You are quite right, and beat me to the punch!
Two days ago I was asked to donate money to this breast cancer "find a cure" campaign, and I told the guy holding out the tin pot, "There will not BE a cure for cancer until the chemical usurpation of the natural world comes to a stop." He looked at me like he'd seen a ghost, but I kept on walking.
Anyone remember the scene where the comedian, Chris Rock mocks Jerry Lewis' telethon? He asks (rhetorically) "And how come they still ain't got no cure for the common cold? And Jerry's kids are still out there?" Indeed... the big question is who's monitoring the 100 plus toxic chemicals most of us now harbor inside our bodily tissues. If insecticide makes a roach turn over and cross its legs, it can't be too good for us, either. Eventually, all these poisons aggregate in our fatty tissue, and the breast happens to represent one of those biological domains.
Good for you! Tell the truth, even tho they don't listen. Our local health dept was doing some breast cancer thing and had individually wrapped mints (read sugar) to give away. I just burst out laughing--sugar for cancer prevention, what a joke, not to mention the wastefulness of the packaging..
Most disease comes from poor diet, lack of physical activity and environmental toxins. To heal, one has to rebuild the body and eliminate the causes, something the medical monopoly can't even fathom.
Hi, Cassandra; and thanks for the vote of confidence. In response to your stating that the medical monopoly can't even fathom the natural approach; the truth is, they do not want to. US medicine today is another venue for Disaster Capitalism. Rather than teach people how to eat, or make sure that subsidized school lunches contain natural produce & fruits, it's far more profitable to RENT people their own bodies via maintenance campaigns such as that used to "treat" Diabetes. (Or chemotherapy.)
With radiation streaming over from Fukushima, and Goddess knows what raining down having evaporated from the Gulf of Mexico, added to the tonnage of detritus carried from the agricultural zones into the recently overflowing Mississippi, the remnants of fracking and coal removal, the effluents of Big Pharma washing down sinks and toilets into our riverways... we are ALL being poisoned. That is a fact! The ability to biologically defend against this onslaught is based on genetics, lifestyle habits, diet, and attitude. IF our "authorities" cared, the first thing they would do would involve regulating industries that pollute the commons, instead of allowing them to perpetually lean on the Protection of the Law to hold them innocent until PROVEN guilty. Due to the preponderance of toxic chemicals in our air, water, and soil, to establish the culpability of but one player (beyond a reasonable doubt) is nearly impossible... and that is why the community of trespass protects the trespassers, not public health. Increasingly! And the Libertarians want even less regulation! Insane...
It's true, the medical monopoly participants are all willfully ignorant. I call it criminal negligence.
It does seem the EPA is another agency that has failed in it's mission.
Disgusting! I'm in treatment for breast cancer and that really pisses me off. Anyone who gets cancer should be given FREE treatment through a cancer tax placed upon the chemical manufacturing and distributing companies combined with federal govt money. The FDA allows the rampant use of these cancer-causing chemicals.
In my area people are asking questions about the whole 'pink' fund raising campaign. How much of the money gets trickled down to those with cancer? How much goes for real research? How much for fund raising/administrative costs?
That is a very good question. Natural News had the answer a few weeks ago. The answer is, more goes to the people running it and the costs then to research or treatment. I think the person who runs in makes a couple of 6 figures.
The idea started out good, but like everything else, it got co opted.
Stores that ask you to donate for any cause takes the tax donation. I pointed that out to a clerk at PetSmart and got the same dumb look.
Great article. Keep reminding people of the connections between chemicals and cancer. I have no doubt that the Susan G. Koman For the Cure campaign was started for all the right reasons. But the problem with all these big fundraising campaigns is that they become an industry that wants to grow -- like an animal whose main focus is its own survival.
The whole "cure for cancer" industry is a big money-raising scam, including the American Cancer Society.
The ONLY cure for cancer is PREVENTION. And that, as people here have commented, will only come about when we stop the chemical releases that are causing so much cancer.
Our bodies make thousands of mutant cells every day; if our immune systems are functioning properly, they get killed before they can grow into cancers. When our immune systems are compromised by being poisoned constantly, then cancers can and do grow.
Write letters to the editor, talk to people, tell them about those stupid plug-in "air fresheners" which are just more chemicals in their breathing air, and those even worse dryer sheets which put smellable chemicals in people's clothing and their bedclothes so they are breathing them all the time!
Of course, we need to keep talking about pesticides in our food, plus the genetically-engineered soy and corn that are ubiquitous in processed food.
If listed ingredients don't say they're organic, they're not, and have likely been sprayed with poisons and/or are genetically-modified with toxic bacteria so the corn or soy plant will be immune to the pesticides sprayed around them. Solution: buy organic and/or grow some of your own food.
Yes, the petrochemical/pharmaceutical industry (all the same few corporations) have much to answer for, but first we have to stop their poisoning our children, drinking waters, wildlife, fisheries, and all of earth.
I agree wholeheartedly with Cleanearth and anyone else who maintains that the entire 'cure for cancer' industry is just that - an industry with its own politics, its own political correctnesses, and its own need to keep growing and feeding its millions of parasites and hangers-on. In short, a scam. Precisely how bloody long has the so-called search for cancer cures of any type been going on? 40 years? 60 years? 160 years?
Of course, ever since the Industrial Revolution, it's the progressively more chemicalized environment we breathe, eat, walk upon, swim in, smell, touch, absorb through our skin that has wrought this scourge of cancer. We've saturated our world with what causes probably the biggest and most famous and most horrific of a range of diseases, and it's become all but impossible to stop the destruction, to clean up the mess, to reverse the plague. There are far too many people and corporations hauling in fortunes from the cancer racket to want this status quo challenged. And it's vital that an increasing number of us do what you did, Sioux Rose, and get in the faces of those soliciting for cancer charities.
I recently worked on one department of the set-up for this Susan G Komen for the Cure (what the hell does that mean, by the way? That Susan Komen is for the cure?) marathon-walkies nonsense in Seattle, Washington. While it was breath-taking how many political/current-affairs-ignorant young women were there working punishing hours on a volunteer basis, and the event, in its cross-country summer juggernaut 'fundraising' had, according to one crew-member on the tour, had already hauled in close to half a million dollars, the part that I found hard to stomach, and now firmly believe to be a piece of classic mind-control 'branding' psychology, is the whole pink ribbon thing. And it certainly doesn't stop with ribbons. Every goddamn thing in sight was pink, and the incredible volume of corporate presence and merchandising was sickening. It appeared to me that this entire 'Susan G. Komen' thing is, while yes, possibly initiated for the right reasons, has been co-opted and corporatized so that, like the rest of the 'cure industry', its CEO and shareholders, including all the usual corporate whore-suspects who've got to be in on anything that huge money is attached to, have now got to hope to hell some cure isn't found, cause their gravy train'll get derailed. I was vastly underwhelmed, and certainly got the impression that one daren't say anything intelligent or critical in the Komen environment. It stank of the very same thought-control that AIPAC, the State of Israel and Zionist apologists use, whereby anyone who criticises the state of Israel and its policies and practices toward Palesatine is accused of anti-semitism. Criticise the industry that Komen is part of and you're guilty of hating or suppressing women.
Of course, cures abound, but like the electric car and investment in green energy, they're being suppressed, in this case by the medical establishment and the pharmaceutical and chemical companies.
Yes, Ms Jackowski, precisely how much of the billions raised and extorted does trickle down, and how much floods upward? How much goes to keep Susan Komen in furs and poisonous perfume and Fifth Avenue digs, and how much goes to an all-out effort to control the chemical saturationof our lives, and to educate new generations about the evils of our cancer-inducing society with all of its technological marvels?
I say, boycott these 'Komen' type rackets and demand results in the research.
I say, demand that the federal governments of the U.S., Canada and the U.K. cease and desist their relentless attempts to gut and marginalize the natural remedies/vitamins/natural healing/homeopathic/alternatives to pharmaceuticals industry
Tara & Clean Earth: Amen, friends!
I just finished a new book and there's a scene where a Brazilian shaman comes to California to attend a workshop given by my story's central character. The shaman says to him, 'You will not be able to heal your self, until you heal the planet," and that's the central theme of the book. Writing is a very synergistic process, as somethng else, like a muse, tends to guide it. So this dialog came about 100 pages from the book's conclusion; and it wasn't until I'd gotten to the last few chapters that I realized how significant that quote would be to the ending.
WE are the world. It's all connected... I remember the scene in the fine film, "Excalibur" where the remaining Knights of the Round Table learn that the king and the land are one; but it's far more than that. An ecological variant upon the theme of "whatsoever you do unto the least of these, is done unto me," the Spirit of Life itself. WE are its extension...
Peace.
Great posts!
My feelings mostly. I recall my mother's breast cancer, after major surgery, a massive wound where once I had suckled.
Early in the last century, biological science and medicine were essentially that. Since then they've been taken over by Big Pharma. There is now huge profit in disease.
I agree with Tara Stone: "I say, boycott these 'Komen' type rackets and demand results in the research.
I say, demand that the federal governments of the U.S., Canada and the U.K. cease and desist their relentless attempts to gut and marginalize the natural remedies/vitamins/natural healing/homeopathic/alternatives to pharmaceuticals industry[.]"
Meanwhile, notice that Medicare recognizes ZERO "homeopathic" medicine while in Germany it is major.
Feeling sick? Don't Occupy. Just take yore Meds!
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