October: Breast Cancer Awareness Month

I found this little blurb in which you may be interested. It speaks to breast cancer and mammary glands specifically but you could use the same idea to consider impacts on any body system/cells.

From the article, We Won't Identify Breast Cancer Risks from Chemicals Until We Test for Them, I've copied a few excerpts below.

Most of the 80,000 chemicals in circulation since World War II have not been tested for toxic impacts on humans. Yet even for the small portion that does get tested—including pharmaceuticals and pesticides—current protocols don’t call for examining what chemicals do to mammary glands.

Breast cancer is a hormone sensitive disease, so something has to be triggering the disruptions in our endocrine systems. Toxic chemicals are a possible culprit, but we won’t know until we test them specifically for their links to mammary tumors.

A review done by the organization Silent Spring looked at the chemicals that have been studied intensively by the national and international authorities. They identified 216 chemicals that cause mammary tumors in animals, but only three are regulated based on danger to mammary glands—a sign that risks to breast tissue is not a high priority.

 To learn more about your endocrine system and endocrine disruptors check here.