In 2002, the Fund for Investigative Journalism supported the work of journalist Mary Ann Swissler as she looked into the finances and politics of the Komen Foundation. Swissler found that the foundation is not transparent about its expenses or politics or its conflicts of interest.
The Susan G. Komen Foundation pays no attention to the environmental causes of breast cancer and its founder was a major contributor to the campaigns of George W. Bush to become governor of Texas and later president of the United States. In return for her more than a quarter of a million dollars, lil Bush rewarded Nancy Brinker with an ambassadorship.
Swissler, an independent journalist, shopped the story to mainstream media outlets and was turned away. The deeply researched story finally received an airing in the always insightful Southern Exposure magazine and was republished by Alternet in 2002.
Please read this important story. Some highlights from Swissler's research follow.
Judy Brady ... has much to say about what she terms "the marketing of breast cancer." One of the worst examples, she says, is the Dallas-based Susan G. Komen Foundation and its annual fundraiser, the 5K Race for the Cure.
Now held year-round in 110 U.S. cities and abroad, the festivities offend Brady and the group Toxic Links Coalition. The races, they say, merely focus women on finding a medical cure for breast cancer, and away from environmental conditions causing it, the problems of the uninsured, and political influence of corporations over the average patient.
To drive this point home, Brady and the coalition have, since 1994, helped organize a vocal and visible presence most years at Komen's San Francisco race.
Sometimes leafleting, and sometimes holding up hand-painted signs and banners, they always face stiff competition from the typically uplifting and euphoric Race atmosphere. ...
"What's missing is the truth," wrote Brady in a Spring 2001 newsletter article for the Women's Cancer Resource Center, a support services center located in Berkeley, Calif. "There's no talk about prevention, except, in terms of lifestyle, your diet for instance. No talk about ways to grow food more safely. No talk about how to curb industrial carcinogens. No talk about contaminated water or global warming."
"I really don't think environmental causes of cancer are acknowledged enough," said Dr. C.W. Jameson of the U.S. National Institutes of Health. "It warrants attention so people can make better, more informed choices, as to where they live or what professions they work in," said Jameson, the director of a biennial report on cancer-causing agents published by the Institute of Environmental Sciences. ...
The heart of the story describes Komen Foundation founder Nancy Brinker's ties to corporations that cause environmental cancers and the battle, led by the Komen Foundation, to stop a meaningful Patients' Bill of Rights from being passed in the early 2000s.
The story discusses the Komen Foundation's many conflicts of interest. "The Foundation ... owns stock in several pharmaceutical companies and in General Electric, one of the largest makers of mammogram machines in the world." ... "At 1998 Food and Drug Administration hearings the Komen Foundation was the only national breast cancer group to endorse the cancer treatment drug tamoxifen as a prevention device for healthy but high-risk women, despite vehement opposition by most other breast cancer groups..." because tamoxifen causes uterine cancer.
"The Komen group's stock portfolios and cozy relationships with Republican leadership set them apart from most breast cancer patient groups."
Swissler, the reporter, ends her story this way.
As Judy Brady points out, the Komen Foundation, and the Brinkers in particular, represent the systemic corruption of business as usual in a corporate-dominated society. "It would be a mistake to demonize the Komen Foundation," Brady says. "They have the best of intentions and I truly believe that they think they are doing good -- with a capital G.
"What they don't see is that 'business as usual' is why we have cancer."