Welcome to the brave new world of Cancers"R"Us. Every three minutes a new breast cancer case is diagnosed in the US and every 12 minutes one of us dies of the disease. One in nine American women will now contract breast cancer - up 50% from 1960 odds, and two-thirds of the time it will hit women with no identifiable risk factors at all. Unjust acts of an insane God? Breast cancer victim and health activist, Judy Brady, doesn't think so. In the following interview, she exposes the institutions and industries that help spread cancer, profiteer from its treatment, and/or perpetuate the myths and misinformation that blind us to their deadly game.

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RDK: Over the past two and a half decades you and your colleagues in San Francisco have been instrumental in redefining the high incidence of cancer as a socio-political problem and not merely a medical issue. Could you recount the evolution of your work?

Brady: When I was diagnosed with cancer in 1980, nobody could explain why I had breast cancer as I had none of the acknowledged risk factors and I had no cancer in my family . The only explanation I got was that I had somehow done something or not done something that I should have done. But my experience with the women's movement helped me understand that the personal is a reflection of the political, and so I rejected the simplistic explanation and started looking for what the political genesis of this disease might be. When I was diagnosed in 1980 the AIDS epidemic had already begun to hit the West Coast. The movement that grew up around it was very different from the cancer movement, but we learned from it. AIDS in this country primarily hit the gay male community which was a very politicized community as well as being affluent and highly educated. All this helped gays mobilize around AIDS very quickly and make it a public health issue almost from its onset. So our influences were not only our civil rights history, the women's movement and the women's health movement, but also the example of the gay community pulling a disease out of the closet and into the streets. Anyway by the Eighties cancer had also really become an epidemic. There were a great many women like me who were experiencing this disease without any plausible explanation of why it was happening

When my friends discovered I had breast cancer they put me in touch with an older colleague from the women's movement called Tish Sommers, who suffered a recurrence of breast cancer and had started a cancer support group. It was the only one in the Bay Area that I knew of in 1980 which was not connected to a medical institution in any way. I was an avid member of her group for years and it helped me in many ways. One of the reasons was precisely because it was not attached to a hospital or conventional cancer society. We could vent what we were thinking and feeling about what had happened to us. We could say that perhaps we were not victims of our own mishaps or inadequacies, but of "something" else. We could talk freely and explore that possibility.

Somewhere along the way a woman named Jackie Winnow joined our group. She had also been diagnosed with breast cancer, but was of a younger political breed than the rest of us and profoundly influenced the development of our activism. She was the only lesbian on San Francisco's civil rights commission, and was also closely affiliated with a cross section of groups working together on anti-war, anti-discrimination, pro-job and pro-disarmament issues. At one of our meetings I suggested that we join the yearly pro-disarmament/anti-nuclear rallies since nuclear stuff causes cancer and as cancer victims we should demand nuclear disarmament. Jackie immediately agreed. And so we were the first cancer group to join these rallies. We made a huge banner that read "Cancer Survivors For Nuclear Disarmament" and printed cancer information leaflets in which we called ourselves "People against Cancer".

We went to the march with this banner and the leaflets, and it was very "interesting". It may be different now, but then the word "cancer" caused a strange reaction. People looked at it and edged away and found some other place to march. All except for one man who greeted us as though we were long lost relatives. He had just lost a dear one to the disease. He was so glad to see us there that he wanted to carry the banner. So we let him carry it for the rest of the march. And that was the beginning, because we decided we should go to all these demonstrations and we did.

Jackie eventually dropped out of the support group to start The Women's Cancer Resource Center, a place that could offer services to cancer victims that were not available elsewhere, such as support groups not tied to the medical establishment, referrals, legal advice, and both personal and political advocacy. Because of Jackie's strong political background the Center automatically became a member of San Francisco's progressive political community, and it also became the only patient resource center in the country that I know of that integrates both health services and political analyses as a part of its program.

We strengthened our affiliation with other groups through the creation of the Toxic Link Coalition. We hosted an informal meeting with several Bay area grassroots groups such as Greenpeace, the West Country Toxic Coalition and Citizens for Better Environment to talk about what we were doing and to see if there were ways we could aid each other in our work. We had no agenda, but at the end of it we all understood that we would benefit from closer communication and agreed to form a coalition. As a joke we called it the Toxics Link Coalition because the initials also stand for tender loving care. The Women's Cancer Resource Center became our meeting place and the Coalition's first major campaign was to organize the Cancer Industry Tour in response to the yearly October Breast Cancer Awareness Month backed by the pharmaceutical industry.

RDK: Why do you call Breast Cancer Awareness Month industry sponsored?

Brady: The Breast Cancer Awareness Month campaign was invented by the Zeneca corporation, which has a board that maintains complete control of every piece of publicity that goes into this campaign. Zeneca is an offspring of Britain's giant Imperial Chemical Company and it is now the third largest producer of pesticides in the US. Since its merger with Astra, the Swedish pharmaceutical corporation, it is also known as Astra Zeneca, and has become one of the leading pharmaceutical companies in the world. The great irony of this company being the chief sponsor of Breast Cancer Awareness Month is that there is now incontrovertible evidence that the prevalence of pesticides is indeed a causal factor in many cases of breast cancer. So Zeneca produces pesticides that cause breast cancer. Its pharmaceutical branch makes Tamoxifen, the most prescribed drug for preventing breast cancer metastasis. It owns a national chain of cancer treatment centers. And finally it oversees all the information Breast Cancer Awareness Month members disseminate about the disease.

As you know, the central message of Breast Cancer Awareness Month is basically, "Go Get a Mammogram!", which is also a controversial technology. NEVER does this so-called "awareness campaign" ever question why there is suddenly so much cancer around now. So every single year millions of well meaning people put on those little pink ribbons, designed by a cosmetic company, hoping for new research to find a cure for this disease. Don't you think this is an amazing publicity coup for a company that is causing the cancer, raking in money by treating victims, and being aggressively silent about why it is occurring?

RDK: Tell us about your Cancer Industry Tour.

Brady: The point of having something like the Cancer Industry Tour is to publicize the fact that there is another way to view what is happening. Cancer has now become such an epidemic that you can hardly meet anyone now who isn't touched by it. Either they themselves have had the disease or somebody in their immediate family or a friend has had it. When I was a child, cancer was really a rare and scary disease. It is not rare anymore, but it is just as frightening as when I was young because none of the so-called advances have made a dent in the death rate.

The public information about cancer has been pretty tightly controlled by what we call the "Cancer Establishment". So when Americans ask about cancer, the answers they hear are from organizations and institutions which, like it or not, have a big stake in the status quo. There are almost no alternative voices except a few little magazines and a couple of books that nobody reads except us.. So that is why we do the tour. We want to reach the public.

We coordinate the Cancer Industry Tour with Cancer Awareness Month, hoping to draw people's attention to the role of industries in the spread of this disease. Our tour includes lectures and street theater and we route it through San Francisco's Financial District, visiting the headquarters of some of the worst polluters. Since these demonstrations are scheduled mid-week during lunch time, people do stop and listen and some may even participate. However we consider ourselves truly successful when we make the evening television news since that obviously spreads our message to a wider audience.

RDK: You referred to the "Cancer Establishment". What do you mean by that?

Brady: I used to say that there are four elements to the Cancer Establishment - and a friend of mine metaphorically compared them to the four horsemen of the apocalypse. Not knowing anything about the Bible I went and looked them up and they were war, famine, pestilence and death. This is a wonderful analogy for the Cancer Establishment, but now I think there are five horsemen and not four.

When I say the Cancer Establishment I mean the specific institutions and organizations which are economically and politically enmeshed and interdependent. The first group are government institutes like the National Institutes for Health which oversees the National Cancer Institute and ancillary government health organizations like the Center for Disease Control. These institutes largely determine the cancer research agenda and are run on our tax money. If you look at the research projects conducted under the National Cancer Institute during any recent year, you will see that as the cancer rates climb their research objectives get more minute, trivial and inane.

The next horseman, if you will, are the private cancer research institutions like Sloan Kettering in New York, Dana Fauber in Boston, M.D. Anderson in Texas, Red Hutchinson in Seattle, etc. Like the government bodies, these institutions also help shape the national research agenda. They are financially connected to the government institutions because they get much of their cancer funding from them.

The third horseman of the Cancer Establishment is the biggest and that is the pharmaceutical industry, which, after defense, is probably the most powerful industry in the United States. It also has a lot to do with what kind of research is done and what kind of protocols are set for cancer treatment. What is particularly disgusting is that the these companies take tax dollars to develop drugs which they then patent and sell back to us for huge profits. Pharmaceutical corporations also get grants from - and give funds to - the private research institutions. In other words, the connection between these three are fairly obvious.

The fourth horseman is the American Cancer Society. Although it is the smallest group and a so-called "charitable organization", it is truly both moneyed and powerful.. The ACS was very influential in establishing the National Cancer Institute, and has played a vital role in determining both its research agenda and protocols. It also plays an enormously important role in influencing how Americans think about the disease. This influence has been very harmful because they have done a lot to keep Americans from making the natural connections - between, for instance, why my mother got breast cancer, the spreading toxins in the environment, the wealth and political power of the drug & chemical industries, etc. And it isn't just the chemical crowd, it is also the nuclear industry. Both, by the way, were immeasurably strengthened during World War II and became the powerful behemoths they are from that effort. Coincidentally cancer incidence begins to rise steeply right after World War II.

These four groupings are the core of the Cancer Establishment. Together they control every single aspect of cancer: what research will be done, how much will be done, who will do it, what research will definitely NOT be done, what will be considered orthodox treatment and what will be considered quackery.

The fifth horseman, which I hate to bring in because I love the Biblical apocalypse analogy, is the public relations industry. It is another extremely powerful industry in this country and almost as wealthy as the pharmaceutical giants. PR corporations were spawned by the advertising industry, but they play a very different role. An advertising agency's job is to make you buy somebody's car or washing machine. A public relations company's job is not to make you buy a product but to mold your thinking in such a way that will be favorable to whatever their client's interests are.

Take the example of Ward Valley where a nuclear dump was to be built in a desert that was sacred land to indigenous tribes. Not only was this land sacred to Native Americans, it was an important refuge for the desert tortoise which is on the endangered species list. The nuclear industry wanted to dig five long unlined trenches side by side in this desert, and then fill them with waste from nuclear power plants in 17 different states. The waste in these unlined pits would be lying right above a relatively shallow aquifer which flows into the Colorado river, the main water source for much of the Southwest. So we are looking at something that is potentially lethal in the extreme.

The nuclear industry is a very powerful industry, and they decided they had to sell Californians on the idea of purchasing the desert from the Feds. The idea was to buy this federal land and build a highly profitable dump. How are they going to persuade people to allow this to happen? Well, here is where public relations expertise comes in. They can mold our opinions so that we agree to things which we may instinctively know are not in our best interests.

The nuclear industry's chief public relations company is a firm called Hill and Knowlton. Hill and Knowlton along with some bankrupt academics from La Jolla used an old PR tactic and created an instant "grassroots" group. We call these fake grassroots organizations "Astroturf". This particular Astroturf outfit was called the National Association of Cancer Patients, and using piles of Hill and Knowlton money from the nuclear industry, it began putting full page ads in newspapers across the state. The message Hill and Knowlton fabricated was that cancer clinics desperately needed a dump for their radioactive byproducts and if Ward Valley wasn't built cancer patients couldn't continue to get their radiation treatments, which is total nonsense. Besides, the amount of radioactive medical material destined for Ward Valley was less than 0.1% of the overall total. This rest would be high-profit waste from the nuclear industry. The people eventually organized against this deception and defeated the campaign in 1999, but the ad campaign was slick and powerful. The one I saw was of a young Asian woman with a tear streaming down her cheek and the message over her picture was "please build the Ward Valley Facility so we can continue to have our cancer treatments." Touching stuff.

PR agencies are paid handsomely to control or spin all news that goes out on their industrial clients. They produce polished promotional pieces which they submit to radio and television stations as "news". It is much easier for news anchors in radio and television to simply run these stories than go out and check the facts or do stories of their own. So by default these agencies supply much of the news we get today. Now they really do have the means to control more and more American minds. It is one aspect of Big Brother's Truth Ministry, but it is profitable and privatized.

RDK: How can cancer victims and activists prevail over the giants that are profiting from the cancer epidemic?

Brady: The biggest hurdles we face are ignorance and misinformation. At this point I can only think of doing whatever we can do to wake people up, particularly people in this country. The public relations industry was born here, and we have been the first victims of its craft. We have been lulled asleep by their chanting "plastics make everything possible," "better living through chemistry," "all is right with the world" and "we are number one." We must awaken people to the reality that they are being victimized for profit and that it is causing their suffering and death. The only way I see that we can fight back is by exposing the establishment's lies. We have to rip away the curtains behind which these industries operate so their deadly game is brought to light.

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Kennebunkport resident, Ms. Dixit-Kubiak is an independent health/environment researcher, yoga teacher, shiatsu therapist, and program coordinator for Big Medicine's Eco-Holistic Health Exchanges. Her email is metamed@nancho.net.