Environmental and occupational pollutants are avoidable causes of breast cancer.

For over three decades, evidence has accumulated relating avoidable exposures to environmental and occupational carcinogens to the escalating incidence of breast cancer in the United States and other major industrialized nations. This evidence has until very recently been totally ignored by the cancer establishment, the National Cancer Institute, and the American Cancer Society, despite expenditures of over $1 billion on breast cancer research. Recognition of these environmental and occupational risk factors should lead to the belated development of public health policies directed to the primary prevention of breast cancer. Their recognition should also lend urgency to the need for radical reforms in the priorities and leadership of the cancer establishment.