Current statistics predict that an alarming one in eight women in North America will contract the disease. This makes it the leading cause of death in women between ages 40 and 55. Since 1950, breast cancer rates have risen from one in twenty to today's rate of one in eight. Organochlorines, first produced in the early 1900's, have been made on a large scale since the second world war, when they were used as poison gases. They include DDT, PCBs, dioxin, Agent Orange and thousands of lesser-known chemical products and byproducts.
Experts say organochlorines are lipophilic-or attracted to fatty tissue.
Mary Wolff, an epidemiologist at the Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York, who led the study says the results surprised even her. I've personally been a skeptic all along about the environmental connections, but I keep being proven wrong. Because of this, she says, epidemiologists sometimes run the risk of becoming limited by their own profession. Similar findings to Wolff's study surfaced in a recent Finnish study. The findings of these two studies confirm similar results by Israeli researchers, the Greenpeace report says.