Air apparent. (updates).(breast cancer rates growing)

The US National Cancer Institute (NCI) has released shocking new figures making it clear that despite the war on breast cancer, the enemy has actually been gaining ground over the past 15 years. Today, numerous environmental health advocates are demanding more research into the possible role of pollutants, radiation and other environmental factors in driving the disease.

The latest numbers, released October 16, 2002, show that the Bethesda, Maryland-based agency had underestimated the incidence of cancer in the United States.

Far from the previous contention that there had been a leveling off or a downturn in cases, new breast cancer diagnoses have, in fact, been growing at a rate of 0.6 percent per year nationwide. That's just an average; rates vary wildly from area to area, supporting the idea of an environmental link to the disease. For instance, breast cancer jumped by 72 percent among women aged 46 to 64 in Marin County, California, during the 1990s, according to a May 2002 report in the journal Breast Cancer Research. Some activists expressed outrage at the new NCI numbers and said they were a further argument for investigating seldom-studied environmental factors. Critics complain that research institutions haven't focused enough on this kind of investigation. Total US federal cancer research spending has increased dramatically from $90 million in 1990 to $800 million in 2001--yet less than 3 percent of those dollars have been spent on researching environmental ...