Issues > September/October 2005 (#110) > Women's Health: 10 Ways to Avoid Reproductive Hazards

Women's Health: 10 Ways to Avoid Reproductive Hazards

High in Washington's Cascade Mountains, in a Bavarian-themed resort town, Rhona Baron and Kurt Carlson sang opera duets and in an a cappella group. As if according to script, the summer-stock actors got married. A baby was expected to dance forth at any moment.

But babies didn't come. At age 36, Rhona had a doctor check her fertility. Instead she got hit with a dramatic diagnosis: early stage ovarian cancer. "I felt like I was a snow globe, shaken very hard," she recalls.

While Rhona realized that she would probably never know why she contracted this complex disease, she couldn't help but wonder: Had she inherited a cancer gene? Or were environmental exposures a culprit? Could working as a young woman in the Oregon forests have exposed her to residues of toxic herbicides that might have led to her cancer?

More than 90 percent of the nearly 1.4 million Americans who will be diagnosed with invasive cancer this year have no known genetic predisposition to the disease; the rest of the cases are attributed to environmental factors: smoking, diet, sun exposure, radiation and man-made chemicals.

This last factor, environmental chemicals and toxicants, accounts for 5 to 10 percent of cancer cases, epidemiologists estimate. Yet comparatively little research over the years has focused on life-long exposures to chemicals, according to Ruthann Rudel, M.S., a senior scientist with the research organization Silent Spring Institute, a non-profit research organization that studies links between the environment and women's health.

"We think the cancer establishment should be spending more money investigating the role of carcinogenic chemicals in everyday products and exposures, to build a knowledge base," says Rudel. She faults organizations such as the American Cancer Society for focusing too much attention on treatment, to the detriment of prevention. "They need to be paying more attention to the 80,000 chemicals in use today, most of which haven't been tested for their health effects."

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