Prevention First: A Coalition of Independent Health Organizations

Over the course of 2001, almost 240,000 American women will hear from their doctors the dreaded words, "you have breast cancer." While billions of dollars are being spent in search of a cure for the disease, efforts to prevent breast cancer are finally getting attention as well. Much of this attention, unfortunately, is directed toward the limited and risky approach of "pills for prevention." While this approach may reduce an individual's chances of developing breast cancer, it ignores a primary prevention strategy that would protect us all by addressing the causes of breast cancer, particularly the environmental links to the disease. While the public is relentlessly bombarded with direct-to-consumer advertising of pills for the prevention of diseases like breast cancer, a public health approach based on the precautionary principle of public health is drowned out by profit-driven pharmaceutical companies that care more about the bottom line than they do about your health.

One of the strategies we will need to shift the public's attention away from pills for cancer prevention toward the precautionary principle toward requiring industry and science to fully assess the impact of their activities before they impose them on the public and the environment and toward finding safe alternatives for activities that pose a threat of harm is a "counter campaign" to the drug companies' current advertising campaigns.

The purpose of the coalition is to promote a view of public health that stresses primary cancer prevention over narrowly focused risk reduction through pharmaceutical interventions. By drawing the public's attention to the dangers of tamoxifen for healthy women -- including the fact that the drug is a known carcinogen and the limited number of people for whom the potential benefits outweigh the potential risks -- we will educate the public about the dangers of simplistic pharmaceutical approaches to disease prevention. These strategies focus on reducing your chances of getting one disease while increasing the dangers of other health consequences. We will work together to inform people about the dangers of breast cancer "prevention" pills -- particularly tamoxifen and raloxifene -- to highlight the problems associated with treating a risk factor as though it were a disease, and to promote greater awareness of the precautionary principle of public health. The coalition will emphasize the difference between "prevention in a pill" and true prevention that involves finding and eradicating the causes of breast cancer, the negative consequences of drug company consumer advertising, and how the relationships between drug companies and medical researchers can compromise research findings and reporting.

The goal of this new coalition is to generate national support for the cardinal principle of public health: disease prevention. Underlying our work is a commitment to promote the Precautionary Principle, which advises us to avoid harm to public health and the environment, even where some scientific uncertainty remains.

Prevention First works to counteract direct-to-consumer advertising of drugs, especially when the advertisement in question is false and misleading. The new coalition of organizations with no ties to the pharmaceutical industry, has begun by focusing on the misleading advertising of tamoxifen, the first anti-cancer drug promoted for healthy people.

As knowledge about the environmental links to disease continue to increase, we will work to change the public's perception that we need "pills for prevention," to a better understanding of the critical role of clean air and water and healthy food for health protection. We are working to challenge the prevailing pharmaceutical approach to health and place much greater emphasis on primary disease prevention by finding and eradicating the causes of diseases like breast cancer.

For more detailed information on Prevention First please visit www.preventionfirstcoalition.org . Our goals are:

To promote a view of public health that stresses primary cancer prevention -- by finding and eliminating the causes of cancer in food, water and air -- over narrowly focused risk reduction through pharmaceutical interventions that may carry significant risks and are not available to everyone.

To inform the public about the dangers of breast cancer "prevention" pills -- particularly tamoxifen and raloxifene.

To highlight the problems associated with treating an individual's risk factors as though they were the disease.

To promote greater awareness of the precautionary principle of public health.

The founding members are:

• Boston Women's Health Book Collective (Boston, MA),
  
• Breast Cancer Action (San Francisco, CA),
  
• Center for Medical Consumers (New York, NY),
  
• DES Action (Oakland, CA),
  
• Massachusetts Breast Cancer Coalition (Randolph, Massachusetts),
  
• National Women's Health Network (Washington, DC),
  
• Women's Community Cancer Project (Cambridge, MA), and
  
• Working Group on Women and Health Protection (Canada) represented by Breast Cancer Action Montreal.

We invite you to support Prevention First by taking one or more of the following steps:

• Endorsing the coalition's goals, and/or
  
• Declaring your organization's independence from pharmaceutical funding, and/or
  
• Indicating your interest in finding out more about the coalition's work and how to get
  involved.

We welcome your support and look forward to being in touch with you about our ongoing work.

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Please print and mail to Breast Cancer Action, the lead organization of the coalition. Prevention First, 55 New Montgomery Street, #323, San Francisco, CA 94105 fax: 415-243-3996, or cut and paste this form into an email and send to Lwanzor@bcaction.org

____ YES! I/my organization endorses the goals of Prevention First. Additional positions not described in this letter and/or actions taken by Prevention First will not include my/our name without express consent having been given.

____ YES! My organization does not accept or will no longer accept support from pharmaceutical companies.

____ YES! Please include me/my organization in your email action list to receive updates and requests for support of additional Prevention First activities.

____ YES: I/we would like to learn more about Prevention First and how we can become involved.