"Study Spotlights High Breast Cancer Risk for Plastics Workers"

"WINDSOR, Ontario -- For more than three decades, workers, most of them women, have complained of dreadful conditions in many of this city’s plastic automotive parts factories: Pungent fumes and dust that caused nosebleeds, headaches, nausea and dizziness. Blobs of smelly, smoldering plastic dumped directly onto the floor. 'It was like hell,' says one woman who still works in the industry."

"The women fretted, usually in private, about what seemed to be an excess of cancer and other diseases in the factories across the river from Detroit. 'People were getting sick, but you never really thought about the plastic itself,' said Gina DeSantis, who has worked at a plant near Windsor for 25 years.

Now, workers like DeSantis are the focal point of a new study that appears to strengthen the tie between breast cancer and toxic exposures.

The six-year study, conducted by a team of researchers from Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom, examined the occupational histories of 1,006 women from Ontario’s Essex and Kent counties who had the disease and 1,146 who didn’t. Adjustments were made for smoking, weight, alcohol use and other lifestyle and reproductive factors."

Jim Morris reports for the Center for Public Integrity November 19, 2012.