For years there have been widely publicized stories about a mysterious cluster of high breast cancer rates for white women in Marin County. An investigation now underway by investigative reporter Peter Byrne for publication in the Point Reyes Light is finding reams of evidence that the incidence rate for white women is high for a simple reason: easier access to mammograms.
Mr. Byrne, who has worked as a science journalist for decades, also says that cancer databases on which incidence rates are based are deeply flawed, that nonprofits have cherry-picked data when discussing the issue and that the entire industry of studying the “problem” is riddled with financial conflicts of interest. He has reviewed thousands of pages of medical studies and public records and interviewed dozens of people; he has also secured $2,000 from the Fund for Investigative Journalism in Washington, D.C. for the project. Last week, the Light and Mr. Byrne launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise $7,500 to finish the investigation and publish a four-part series as well as an ebook.
“One reason that millions of dollars have been thrown at issue is because there’s a false assumption that wealthy white women are more at risk of getting it, even though they’re not at most risk of dying,” he said. In fact, African American women are significantly more likely to die of breast cancer, he went on, in large part because they “have less access to quality medical care that white ladies in Marin do. Common sense goes a long way in this.”
Mr. Byrne’s suspicions were aroused back in 2006, as he wrote a book about a quantum physicist. He was reading about probability when he came across an interesting fact: the more mammograms a woman has, the more likely she is to get a false positive. Living in the Bay Area for decades, he had read stories in the San Francisco Chronicle about unexplained high incidence rates of breast cancer in wealthy Marin, particularly of white women.
His work over the past few years has uncovered evidence that the high incidence rate is due to the fact that well-off women have better access to medical care and are far more likely to have regular mammograms. Those mammograms can produce false positives and detect cancers that, in all likelihood, would never have metastasized, leading to painful, costly and unnecessary treatments. (In 2009, in fact, a task force of experts said that mammograms for women under 50 were counterproductive because they resulted in so much overtreatment.)
But, he says, governments and nonprofits have spent massive amounts of money studying the problem. And some efforts have included conflicts of interest: the Marin Women’s Study, he said—in which white women took surveys answering a number of lifestyle questions to suss out potentially cancer-causing chemicals in their lives—was funded in part by Avon, which produces cosmetics with carcinogenic ingredients.
To contribute to the campaign, which ends on March 12, visit kickstarter.com/projects/782669537/busted-breast-cancer-money-and-the-media.