We couldn’t be more excited to announce that Protect Our Breasts—the country’s only national program dedicated to educating college students about toxic chemicals linked to breast cancer—has officially become a project of Breast Cancer Prevention Partners (BCPP).
We are deeply grateful to the Jack and Goldie Nomberg Foundation, the Kanengiser Family, and the Peters Family, for their generous support of BCPP and Protect Our Breasts. Their contributions are instrumental in advancing our critical work to prevent breast cancer and creating a lasting impact—especially for future generations.
When University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Marketing Faculty Cynthia Barstow learned about the environmental factors linked to breast cancer after receiving her own diagnosis, she decided she needed to share this information. When she learned that the toxic chemicals a woman is exposed to when she was young could impact her risk of breast cancer later in life, she especially knew it was important to teach these lessons to her students. For over ten years now, these students and others around the country have been educating young people about how to protect themselves from chemicals linked to breast cancer. Now, BCPP and Protect Our Breasts will team up to expand the reach of this important message and to work together to prevent breast cancer before it starts.
In the words of Protect Our Breasts:
‘The Protect Our Breasts communications initiative is an interdisciplinary project of marketing and biology at the University of Massachusetts. A team of students from across the academic specialties from finance to public health work together to research and share the scientific discoveries and safer alternatives to everyday toxic chemicals. While the science presents a web of causality for breast cancer, we are dedicated to snipping away at these potential causes. We adhere to the Precautionary Principle while we still “lack irrefutable proof of harm.” Protect Our Breasts approaches the communication about safer alternatives or solutions to chemical safety in two ways. Our first approach is information sharing. We “share the conversation” meaning what science-based breast cancer organizations, science sources and others who are highly respected for their work in this field, are discovering about these chemicals of concern and the solutions for avoiding them. In addition to communicating to our online community, Protect Our Breasts participates in and hosts a variety of events held on different campuses throughout the academic year. At these events, chapter members have the opportunity to share both information and “a safer alternative product.” The reasoning behind sharing these products is to support companies who are making change in the marketplace while providing a solution to students who often feel burdened by the idea that “everything causes cancer.”’
