We know it is approved for tubing used to process milk. Soto then discovered that tiny amounts of nonylphenol build up over time in the body. Now studies have been launched to find out how chemicals interact in humans, perhaps in the process intensifying their toxic impact. The arguments linking pollution and breast cancer are just beginning to filter out to the wider world. In the U.S. it is the second leading cause of cancer death among all women.
Lung cancer is the first.
Rates are lowest in parts of Africa and Southeast Asia, including Thailand, and parts of China, and in Japan, Gambia, and Algeria. According to research, dietary factors, such as low consumption of meat, processed foods, and animal fats accounted for low rates in China. High consumption of soy products may have contributed to low rates in Japan, though rates are rising in that country due to increased industrialization and possibly due to long-term effects of radiation from the atomic bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. When young women in the eastern U.S. first went to work during World War I, applying luminescent radium paint to clock and watch faces, radium was being touted as having medicinal, almost magical properties. In the fifteen years that followed, as the radioactivity was deposited in their bones disfigured and killed more than two dozen workers, the reformers of the time struggled to gain recognition of radium's dangers against the intransigence of the industry.