What's News?
Houston Post 10/16/93
What is missing from this article? We must read between the lines and if proven true, ponder the theoretical as well as the practical significance of any report. I laughed when I read this. I have been warning people about chlorine for years, but I tell them not to drink tap water. Municipal water treatment plants put so much chlorine in the water nowadays that it smells like a swimming pool when ever you turn on the tap. It is far more likely that your body will be polluted by chlorine in your water than from your plastic wrap, or paper. Pesticides are a concern; but not as pressing as the water you drink every day.
I recommend home distillation or purification immediately. See “Water, Water Everywhere, But Not a Drop to Drink” in the Jan/Feb 93 issue.
Cancer survivor Abzug, others campaign against use of chlorine – Associate Press
Washington – Aided by former congresswoman Bella Abzug, herself a breast cancer survivor, environmentalists started a campaign Friday to discourage the use of chemicals made from chlorine as a precaution against the disease.
“Studies have found that women with the highest amounts of these chemicals in their body have breast cancer risks four to 10 times higher than women with lower levels,” said Joe Thornton, who wrote a report on the chemicals for the environmental group Greenpeace.
If future studies confirm those numbers, he said, “organochlorines would be among the strongest risk factors for breast cancer ever identified.”
Joe Walker, associate director of the Chlorine Chemistry Council said the industry group is reviewing the report.
“Because breast cancer is such a frightening illness that touched literally all of our lives,” he said, “the last thing we want is for women to be alarmed by preliminary findings from selective studies.”
He said groups like Greenpeace fail to acknowledge that many applications of chlorine chemistry replaced products less environmentally acceptable. “There is much more to learn,” Walker said. “Studies to date are inconclusive; that’s why ongoing research is critical.”
Greenpeace and women’s groups demanded that organochlorines – chlorine-based chemicals – be phased out worldwide. Many commonly used items, including clear plastic wrap, pesticides and paper, are made with organochlorines.
“We want prevention,” said Abzug, who heads the Women’s Environment Development Organization. “You cannot get prevention unless there is a basic commitment to research, to funding, to a consciousness that doesn’t seem to exist in the cancer agencies in the government or out of the government.”
Dr. Susan Sieber, deputy director of the division of Cancer Ideology at the National Cancer Institute, said the idea that all chlorine-based chemicals should be banned “is nonsense, based on data currently available.”
She said two small studies in the last year contain intriguing findings about the role of chlorine-based chemicals but “they certainly are not definitive evidence that there is a link with breast cancer.” The caner institute is doing such a study, she said.