Reducing the Risk of Breast Cancer Project

The Reducing the Risk of Breast Cancer project is a community-based look at the potential for environmental exposures to cause breast cancer. It is based in the Toronto community of South Riverdale and involves local participants who surveyed the scientific evidence and developed recommendations for reducing risk.

The project has looked at the impact that the environment might have in increasing breast cancer in South Riverdale and elsewhere in Canada. It deals with contaminants and pollution, substances in the environment that may cause harm through food, air, water, dust/soil or directly through products.

Project partners:

Canadian Environmental Law Association
Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment
South Riverdale Community Health Centre

The project is funded by the Ontario Chapter of the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation.

The project objectives:

To increase community participants’ knowledge of environmental exposures and their potential risks for breast cancer;
To increase the skills of community participants to evaluate scientific information related to environmental contaminants and the level of hazard and risk;
To develop recommendations for action to prevent environmental causes of breast cancer; and
To successfully pilot a participatory community-based, risk assessment project that could be a model for other community decision-making work both in South Riverdale and beyond.

What the project tries to do:

To bring user-friendly, unbiased, reliable information to community participants;
To assist participants in understanding and interpreting environment and health information; and
To assist the community in making recommendations for action based on this process.

The guiding question:

In what ways might the residents of South Riverdale be exposed to environmental hazards that could increase their risk of breast cancer?

How the project works:

The Reducing the Risk of Breast Cancer project recruited 14 residents from within South Riverdale to form a citizen’s panel. The idea of using a panel was to have people from the neighbourhood in part represent the values of the community or communities. The project is designed to allow representatives of the South Riverdale community an opportunity to look broadly at the state of the science regarding environmental contaminants and breast cancer. They also have a chance to learn about the kinds of environmental exposures that are routine for Canadians and those that might be specific to South Riverdale.

The community participants guided the research into the scientific literature and used the information to come to their own conclusions about the breast cancer risks they are being exposed to. Based on these conclusions, they came up with a number of recommendations for how to reduce exposures, and a list of ideas for next steps.

The design of the project is based on decision-making processes used elsewhere like science juries and consensus conferences. These decision-making models are based on the idea that conflicts related to science are less about disagreements about the science itself and more from the values and perspectives we bring to those decisions. Our reactions to scientific evidence are related to things like how much risk we think is acceptable and how much we trust different experts and decision-makers.

Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation

The project partners thank the Ontario Chapter of the Canadian Breast
Cancer Foundation for their generous support of this project.

For more information, or to get involved, please contact:

Farrah Khan
farrah@cape.ca
416-306-2273

documents:

Breast Cancer and the Environment in South Riverdale