The American Cancer Society (ACS) is involved financially with manufacturers of mammography devices, tainting its cancer screenings with conflict of interest, cancer prevention experts Samuel S. Epstein and Rosalie Bertell have charged.
The United States Preventive Service Task Force recently revised its breast cancer screening guidelines to recommend fewer mammograms, in part due to the fact that radiation from mammograms can actually increase cancer risk. According to Epstein and Bertell, a premenopausal woman could receive 5 rads of radiation exposure in 10 years from mammograms alone, equivalent to the exposure experienced by a woman standing one mile from the detonation of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Mammograms are also better at detecting non-threatening cancers that would never have required treatment than the more aggressive, lethal varieties. Yet an ACS ad published in a leading Massachussetts newspaper showed two women in their twenties (the federal government no longer recommends mammograms for most women under the age of 40) and promised that early detection cures breast cancer "nearly 100 percent of the time."
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