AstraZeneca
is a British-based multinational giant that manufactures the cancer drug tamoxifen as well as fungicides and herbicides, including the carcinogen acetochlor.
Its Perry, Ohio, chemical plant is the third-largest source of potential cancer-causing pollution in the United States, releasing 53,000 pounds of recognized carcinogens into the air in 1996.
When Zeneca created Breast Cancer Awareness Month in 1985, it was owned by Imperial Chemical Industries, a multibillion-dollar producer of pesticides, paper, and plastics. State and federal agencies sued ICI in 1990, alleging that it dumped DDT and PCBs-both banned in the United States since the 1970s-in Los Angeles and Long Beach harbors. Any mention of what role such chemicals may be playing in rising breast cancer rates is missing from Breast Cancer Awareness Month promos.
another behemoth G
eneral Electric:
"We bring good things to what again...?"
A major chemical and waste dumper with a financial interest in cancer products.
GE is a major polluter in PCBs in the Hudson River.
GE also manufactures mammogram machines.
An estimated million pounds of PCBs lie buried at the bottom of a 40-mile stretch of the Hudson, where GE dumped PCB oil until the mid-1970s, contaminating the entire 200-mile length of the river below Hudson Falls. Although PCBs (a family of 209 organochlorine chemicals) were banned in 1977, the chemicals persist in soil, air, lakes, and oceans. Classified by the EPA as probable human carcinogens, PCBs are found in the fatty tissue, sperm, blood, and milk of animals and humans the world over. Although PCBs vary in their effects, several studies link some PCBs to human breast cancer.
Faced with a government-proposed cleanup plan that would cost hundreds of millions of dollars, GE launched a local media offensive assailing the measure as unnecessary because the river is "cleaning itself." These PR efforts (which happened to be aimed at a community with one of the highest breast cancer rates in the United States) prompted EPA Administrator Carol Browner to complain to the New York Assembly in 1998: "GE would have the people of the Hudson River believe, and I quote, 'living in a PCB-laden area is not dangerous.'
The science tells us the opposite is true."
do you think they might influence the media at all?
Click HERE to see what General Electric Owns
thanks to Sharon Batt & Liza Gross (Sierra Magazine)
