What was the Toxic Links Coalition?
The Toxic Links Coalition (TLC) was an alliance of community groups, women with cancer and cancer survivors, health care and environmental justice organizations, silicone survivors, women with endometriosis, and other reproductive disorders, and concerned individuals working together to educate our communities about the links between environmental toxins and the decline in public health.
Founded in 1994, the Toxic Links Coalition worked to stop the proliferation of chemical, radioactive, and industrial substances that threaten human health and the health of the planet. The Toxic Links Coalition believed that we all have a right to health and environmental justice; views cancer and other environmentally linked diseases and disorders as human rights abuses, not as individual medical problems; targets companies that perpetrate irresponsible production, use, and disposal of carcinogenic and toxic wastes and products; demands accountability from corporate and agricultural polluters; works against environmental racism, and recognizes that people of color, immigrants, and workers bear a disproportionately high toxic burden.
In August 1995, TLC hosted a Women's Health and the Environment Public Hearing, followed by a Community Action Conference. A two-day event with attendance of more than 300, this conference included speakers from all over the US, workshops, and a march to the Chevron/Ortho hazardous waste incinerator in Richmond, a community that has been continually assaulted by noxious emissions. Thanks to grassroots pressure from the West County Toxics Coalition and support from TLC, in mid-1997, Chevron was forced to close its incinerator!
TLC renamed a public relations gimmick created and hosted by pharmaceutical and chemical giant, Zeneca, known as "Breast Cancer Awareness Month" (October), to "Cancer Industry Awareness Month." TLC educated the public about companies with questionable ethical and environmental track records who hold a vested financial interest in maintaining the current cancer research, treatment, and prevention strategy standards.
TLC organized the annual Cancer Industry Awareness Tour of San Francisco, a walking tour and protest through the heart of San Francisco's Financial District, where tour stops included the corporate offices of some of the world's worst polluters.
Recent History of the Cancer Epidemic
Since 1971, when President Nixon declared the "War on Cancer," more than one trillion dollars have been spent battling cancer. Despite this, overall cancer incidence and mortality rates in the U.S. have continued to spiral upward. Cancer will soon become the leading cause of death in our country. Over the last 20 years, breast cancer alone has claimed more American lives than the Vietnam and Korean wars, World War I, and World War II combined. According to the American Cancer Society's 1995 statistics, more than one in three women and nearly one in two men will face the diagnosis of cancer at some time in their lives. Thus, in our lifetime, cancer has become an epidemic.
Locally, the San Francisco Bay Area has one of the highest overall cancer rates in the country and is reputed to have the highest breast cancer rate in the world. Among the population of African American women under age 50 living in San Francisco's Bay View/Hunter's Point district, breast cancer rates are double that of any other part of San Francisco.
The evidence is in. We are losing the war against cancer.