Keeping abreast of the issues

Suddenly, it seems breasts are everywhere, and not the usual bikini-clad, silicone-inflated, bronzed-and-oiled ones that signify the beginning of summer. I’m talking tumor-laden, diseased breasts. Knockers that might just knock you dead.

Lately it seems that Black women are just ticking with breast-cancer time-bombs, which are much more deadly than the garden-variety white women breast cancers.
While this is an important story, it seems that a lot of coverage seems to be focused on putting those old notions about poorer access and healthcare to rest. See? There’s no racism/classism at play (or if there is, it’s parenthetically noted way down) to the fact that black women are twice as likely to die from breast cancer than whites. It’s just the way they’re made.
My favorite was the ABC transcript explaining the study:

IMPORTANT NEW INFORMATION ABOUT BREAST CANCER, THERE’S A NEW STUDY THAT EXPLAINS “WHY” AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN ARE MORELY LIKELY TO “DIE” FROM BREAST CANCER. MEDICAL REPORTER KATHY FOWLER EXPLAINS.

“Why” in quotations like, “as if”, and apparently Black women don’t die. They just “die”.
It may be sloppy grammar, but it seems to be a winking dismissal of the entire topic.

In other breast news, I was shocked– shocked I tell you– to learn that the government has been less than forthcoming about the real results of a recent study comparing ye olde anti-breast cancer stand-by, tamoxifen, to newcomer, raloxifene. The Nat’l Cancer Institute held a hasty press conference announcing that compared to tamoxifen, raloxifene had fewer incidents of invasive uterine cancer and fewer blood clots, and therefore was a better pick.
Come to find out, the incidence of both was so low as to make the difference statistically insignificant.
Kudos to Denise Grady of the NYTimes who called the results like she saw ‘em She notes that there are pros and cons with both, and the study does not produce any clear winner except the need for more research.

Many others followed suit.

But what really interested me was what wasn’t said.
Why, I thought to myself, would the government play up such weak results for one particular drug over another? Did the government– which, footed the bill for the $88 million study– have a vested interested in, oh say, Eli Lilly, the maker of raloxifene, which happens to be going up for FDA approval as an anti-cancer drug very soon (it’s currently only approved to fight osteoporosis)?

In a word, yes.
In fact, it seems that Eli Lilly execs and former execs hold important places in the Bush Administration: George Bush Sr. sat on Lilly’s board of directors; Bush appointed Mitch Daniels Jr., former Lilly presdient of North American Operations, to be the director of management & budget in 2002; Randall Tobias, former Lilly CEO became Bush’s Global AIDS coordinator in 2003. Bush appointed Sidney Taurel, Chairman and CEO of Eli Lilly to the Homeland Security Advisory Council on June 11, 2002, then, mysteriously, a few months later, a provision appeared in the Homeland Security bill protecting Eli Lilly from lawsuits from parents who believe the mercury-containing component of vaccines caused their children’s autism . Then, last July, Scott Gottlieb was appointed to be deputy commissioner for medical and scientific affairs of the FDA, his long-time ties to the pharmaceutical industry forcing him to recuse himself from considering issues regarding certain companies, including Eli Lilly.
Not to mention Lilly contributed $1.6 million in 2000 elections– nearly 80% of which went to Republicans, according to Arianna Huffington at AlterNet.

Not one article I could find on Google or Lexis on the govt.’s out-of-the-blue and misleading endorsement of raloxifene mentioned these things. Nor have I found any article that discusses the real issues of racism in access to quality healthcare, or how much that determines whether or not these invasive cancers that Black women seem to be more prone to, actually kill them. What I would like to see is some reports on the politics of breast cancer, and how how the pharamceutical companies, with the aid of certain higher-ups, seem to be, forgive me, milking it to their benefit.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 7th, 2006 at 8:07 am and is filed under Domestic Politics, Drugs, Feminism, Health & Sexuality, Race, Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.