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Geography of Breast Cancer

When it comes to cancer, one of the hardest things for scientists to prove is direct causation. Did the spraying of DDT near your home give you breast cancer? Or was it because you ate a poor diet, or waited too long to have children, or were born with a genetic predisposition? Or all of the above?

These questions have frustrated researchers and cancer survivors for decades. But now, in part thanks to the prodding of breast cancer activists, researchers have a new tool that might help to answer some of these questions: maps.

Not just any old maps, but a sophisticated mapping system known as the Geographic Information System, or GIS. The maps help researchers to reconstruct past environmental exposures (such as living in an area that was sprayed for gypsy moths) and link them to cancer “hot spots,” such as Cape Cod or Long Island.

Researchers already know that some areas of the United States experience dramatically higher rates of breast cancer than others. For example, breast cancer rates for Cape Cod are 20 percent higher than the rest of Massachusetts. The rate of breast cancer in the Northeastern United States as a whole is 16 percent higher than the rest of the country. And the area from New York City to Philadelphia is 7.4 percent higher than the rest of the Northeast.

The United States, for that matter, experiences much higher rates of breast cancer than Europe or Asia, but when Asian women move to the United States, their offspring are more likely to develop breast cancer, pointing towards environmental or dietary conditions unique to this country that raise the risk of disease.

Activists and researchers alike hope the mapping technology will help them to more accurately link breast cancer incidence to specific exposures, since so little research currently focuses on environmental factors. Already, they have been able to show that women on Long Island who lived within a mile of a hazardous waste site had higher rates of breast cancer.

In the meantime, some say that banning suspect chemicals and products can go a long way toward preventing breast cancer in the first place.

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To read more about this and other environmental health issues, go to: www.environmentalhealthnews.org, www.ourstolenfuture.org, or www.healthandenvironment.org