Writing the Next Chapter – People & Issues Revisited
In its own recent anniversary issue, Vanity Fair stated the following: “Monthly-magazine journalism is arguably the golden mean for those who want to keep up and also to take a step back.” That encapsulates the philosophy guiding my editorial vision: current news about the issues facing Vermont women, presented with rich context in a thoughtful, intelligent and reflective manner – dead serious when necessary, balanced by playful spirit – and always with the objective of making our world a better place.
I applaud the excellent work of all our dedicated writers and columnists. I’d like to gratefully acknowledge the feature writing contributed by a number of writers who have been a part of this effort virtually from the beginning of my tenure as editor: Rickey Gard Diamond, Mary Fratini, Trina Hikel, Cindy Hill, and Amy Lilly.
For this, our fifth anniversary, we revisited a number of the people and issues we covered early on, and present the following updates below on what has transpired over the course of the last five years (Bantu women and Vermont Refugee Resettlement Program; Women deployed in VT National Guard; Incarcerated women in VT; Dr. David Krag’s cancer research efforts; Breast cancer – go green, not pink; Grace Paley in memoriam).
Having reviewed all our past editions – that have featured so many fascinating people and compelling topics throughout our state – it’s clear that we’ll have to continue bringing you periodic updates on what they’ve been up to. Thank you, Vermonters, for all you do.
– Margaret Michniewicz, Editor
Welcome, Bantu Women!
The cover of our inaugural issue of October 2003 (www.vermontwoman.com/articles/1003/index.shtml) was graced by the radiantly smiling Muslimo Ahmed and her child. Muslimo and two other Somali Bantu women refugees – Asha Abdulle and Abai Abdi – had just in the previous few months arrived with their husbands and children, about to make a new home here through the assistance of the Vermont Refugee Resettlement Program (VRRP). Through the translation by Somali caseworker and interpreter Nimo Girreh, herself a refugee, Asha, Muslimo, and Abai shared stories with us as we visited in Muslimo’s tiny Winooski apartment, their children playing contentedly close by their mothers. This was the first time in any of these children’s lives that they were not living in a refugee camp.
VRRP is a field office of the United States Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI) that has helped people flee war and persecution for nearly a century. Over the past 16 years, VRRP has assisted approximately 5,000 people to resettle in Vermont. According to executive director Judy Scott, they still have a number of refugees arriving from African nations. “But over the past fiscal year the three main cultures arriving are people from Bhutan, Burma or Myanmar, and Iraq,” she says. Although the people who settle in Vermont through VRRP may move out of state to join relatives, it is highly unlikely that any would ever be able to return to their original homes – that is not a viable option, Scott says. And so, she notes, “People really put their hearts and souls into making a new life here.” The goal of VRRP is to give [these] clients the tools to build new lives for themselves and become a vital and contributing part of the community, she explains, citing employment as the primary means to that end. She encourages potential employers to inquire about the assistance VRRP can offer in facilitating the hiring of refugees, helping with initial job site training and interpretation. The contact person is Ongyel Sherpa at 654-1717.
Since our meeting five years ago, Asha, Muslimo, and Abai and their families have each moved from Winooski to Burlington and are busy raising their children. Though we might imagine many of the challenges they face establishing a home in a strange new culture, there are no doubt many more that we could never have foreseen, as illustrated by an anecdote that Scott relates in the current VRRP newsletter. She had realized that several new arrivals [from Somalia] who were pregnant had concerns about giving birth in a hospital, as they had previously given birth at home in the refugee camps. (And, as Muslimo told Vermont Woman in 2003, her mother served as her midwife.) Scott was puzzled by the less than enthusiastic response she received to her announcement that a tour had been arranged for the women of a local hospital’s birthing center and postpartum floor, thinking this would help allay their anxieties. But for them, a hospital was only understood as a place to go to die. “Dire necessity might force you to go there, but no one would choose to go,” Scott wrote. It’s no wonder her idea was “met with polite murmurs and uncomfortable expressions”! (She later found a way of communicating that here, there are additional functions that hospitals can provide.)
Note: VRRP is in need of warm winter blankets for clients who have arrived this year. Help ease their transition into the Vermont climate by donating blankets in clean and good condition (wool or thick blankets gladly accepted, but no electric blankets). Call Gabriel, 338-4633 (9-4:30 weekdays) for info on dropping them off. For more info about VRRP visit www.vrrp.org.
Read the October 2003 article by Joyce Carroll at
www.vermontwoman.com/articles/1003/bantu.shtml
Off to War
It was a brutally cold January day in 2004 when members of the Vermont National Guard deployed to Iraq. We witnessed the heart-wrenching goodbyes shared between wives and husbands, parents and children, and young sweethearts. The somber ceremonies were led by the Guard’s leader, Major General Martha Rainville, joined by Vermont’s Congressional delegation.
According to the Guard’s Public Affairs Officer Captain Kate Irish, “Approximately 128 Vermont women have deployed in support of [either] Operation Iraqi Freedom or Operation Enduring Freedom – approximately 75 Army Guard and 53 Air Guard females have deployed in support of the Global War on Terror since it began.”
St. Albans native Jessica Norris (formerly Petit) was among those who deployed on January 23, 2004; she was pictured with her parents and brothers in our Feb. 2004 issue. She was 24 when she deployed. “I joined the VT National Guard through the ROTC program at UVM. The Guard had scholarship programs to help pay for college. I had a great time during ROTC, and was glad I joined,” she says.
Norris was based in Iraq until her return home in February 2005. She was a Second Lieutenant when deployed, and promoted to First Lieutenant. Since her return home she has earned the rank of Captain – in addition to her new job as a Burlington Police Officer. She has bought a house, remarried and, she smiles, has a child on the way.
Norris describes her duties while serving: “I was a Military Police Platoon Leader in charge of 32 men while deployed. Our main mission was convoy security throughout Iraq. In other words we ensured essential supplies were delivered safely to their destinations.
“While deployed,” she continues, “I was also the Company’s Civil Affairs representative. A couple of times during the week we would go to the local schools and hand out all of the school supplies to the kids. These supplies came from stateside from all of the businesses, charities, schools, and people that donated supplies overseas for the schools. The schoolteachers and children would always smile and wave as we came with the supplies knowing we were there to help them. It reminded us of the reasons why we were there.”
Norris is still in the Guard, and notes that she could potentially be redeployed at any time.
On May 19 of this year, military officials announced the alert of the 86th Brigade Combat Team, Vermont Army National Guard in support of Operation Enduring Freedom to continue training of the Afghan National Security Forces in Afghanistan. More than 3,100 soldiers alerted will deploy in the spring of 2010, which, according to Irish, would be the largest group from Vermont to date. She notes that circumstances could change and they might not be deployed, but until that time they need to be prepared to go if called.
Reported by Margaret Michniewicz; for original article by Helen Simon-Franzak see
www.vermontwoman.com/articles/0204/vermonters-in-war.shtml; and for our October 2004 interview with Major General Martha Rainville, see www.vermontwoman.com/articles/1004/martha-rainville.shtml.
Doing Time
Four years ago Vermont Woman went inside Vermont’s two prisons for women – Dale Correctional Facility in Waterbury and the Southeast Correctional Facility in Windsor. At that point in time, the number of incarcerated women in Vermont had surged 500 percent in the previous ten years, to almost 150. Jill Evans, director of correctional services for women offenders at the Department of Corrections, said at the time: “We are within single digits of overcapacity for women every weekend. If that happens, we will have no choice but to send women out of state.”
Our original report came amidst a flurry of activity in Montpelier related to the Department of Corrections (DOC) including a wholesale reorganization of the Agency of Human Services (AHS), a final report from the Governor’s Commission on Overcrowding, and the recent suicides of female inmates in Waterbury.
In the months following our story, then-AHS Secretary Mike Smith instituted the Incarcerated Women’s Initiative (IWI), with a goal of not just halting, but reversing the trend towards increased incarceration for women in Vermont.
Success was difficult to find, at first, but the total number of women under DOC supervision is now just 2,267, a 17 percent reduction since 2005, according to Susan Onderwyzer, a program service executive with the DOC.
But the biggest change for women in prison in Vermont is just on the horizon – as of January, all women will be moved to St. Albans as part of cost-saving measures passed by the Legislature this session. “We are looking into how to assist families in transportation and access to visiting, however, the location of the St Albans facility will ultimately make it easier for many families/women inmates, the majority of whom, come from Chittenden County,” Onderwyzer said.
The St. Albans prison will house approximately 150 women and DOC will continue to use regional facilities for overnight detention and intakes from various regions across the state, according to Onderwyzer. “[It] will have a comprehensive treatment component, which provides intervention on a continuum of needs and services and will work closely with community providers,” she said. This complements the existing substance abuse treatment programs known as Tapestry, Tapestry II (a short-term program for women relapsing and in danger of reincarceration), and Valley Vista.
And though the legislative focus has shifted to include a focus on the children of incarcerated parents, the ongoing attention is crucial. “It has spurred a great deal of interest in application of the team approach to working with men as well as women, and has provided an opportunity to create more collaborative relationships and services for people under the criminal justice system who have problems with substances and/or health and mental health issues, as well as other psycho-social needs,” she noted.
Reported by Mary Fratini; for original article see
www.vermontwoman.com/articles/1104/life-inside.shtml.
Dr. David Krag’s Quest for the Cure
Almost 20 years after moving to Vermont as the state’s first surgical oncologist, Dr. David Krag hasn’t slowed down at all. When Vermont Woman spoke with Krag, the S.D. Ireland Professor of Surgical Oncology at the University of Vermont (UVM), in 2006, he was in the midst of multiple breast cancer research trials at the clinical, regional and national level and in the early conceptual stages of creating a radical new approach to managing medical literature. Today, that concept has become Plomics, Inc., an online subscription reference system for medical research.
Krag was a pioneer in developing an alternative and less invasive approach to cancer surgery known as sentinel node biopsy. It has since become the standard of care for a wide range of cancers affecting the lymphatic system, but there was no data on the long-term survival rates compared with the previous approach known as axillary node dissection. In 1998 Krag began a 15-year study of more than 5,000 women with breast cancer at 80 centers throughout North America. While he is still awaiting major outcomes from the study, early analysis of technical results indicates better results with the removal of two or three lymph nodes, as opposed to just one.
“That is changing my practice already,” Krag noted. “Instead of doing the least possible, you should look around for another lymph node or two. It still preserves the bulk of the nodes and avoids the problems of removing them all, but we’ve learned to be not quite so minimalist.”
Krag expects to have the final data on long-term survival rates within the next 12-24 months.
Within the study of long-term survival following sentinel node biopsy, Krag embedded a second trial to try to determine the correlation between the presence of individual cancer cells in otherwise negative nodes and patients’ survival rates, again using an alternative form of analysis. “We are definitely finding a persistent rate of cancer cells,” with the additional analysis, Krag said. “The question will be, is there a difference in survival? Do these matter and do we need a new staging system now?”
Krag is also continuing his studies analyzing bone marrow for early evidence of metastasis, and examining blood protein profiles with a goal of developing a blood test for breast cancer and even a personalized delivery system for chemotherapy. For the bone marrow study, Krag plans to follow 1600 breast cancer patients across North America for 10 years; approximately 400 women are already enrolled.
As a private company, Plomics Inc. is a slightly different endeavor than Krag’s “bench-to-bedside” research, but stems from the same incessant curiosity. “It needs to be in the form of a business to be sustainable,” Krag said, noting that a portion of the National Institute of Health’s budget is mandated for small businesses, providing another source of funding in a tight financial climate.
Ultimately Plomics will be a clearinghouse of all the medical research stored at the National Library of Medicine, currently some 18 million articles and growing by an additional 1 million each year. “There needs to be a way to manage this information,” Krag noted, describing it as a system blending a human expert categorizing the articles and a computer to automate the process. Krag hopes to have two modules, or topics, available to the public within the next year, with the support of UVM and the Vermont Center for Emerging Technology.
Funding for Krag’s research has always been time-consuming, especially for the early stages of in-house clinical experiments. The creation of the S.D. Ireland Foundation for Cancer Research and the endowment of a professorship in surgical oncology at the University of Vermont in 1999 have been invaluable for stabilizing the cash flow.
“It is much worse than before, which means what the Irelands and people supporting that foundation are doing is even more important than before,” Krag said. “But we want to use those funds from the Ireland Foundation for new research, so if we have trouble finishing things that were previously funded by [the National Cancer Institute], we have to devote those funds to finishing existing projects, and that slows us down.”
Reported by Mary Fratini; for original article visit
www.vermontwoman.com/articles/1006/krag.shtml.
A Greener Shade of Pink
In February 2004, Vermont Woman reported on the politics of breast cancer (“Tangled Up In Pink”) and the questionable effect the pink-ribbon movement had on the problem of breast cancer. Little has changed: a woman’s lifetime risk is still one in eight. Breast-cancer survivors number about two million in the U.S. today. Few citizens are unaware of this disease.
Still, “Breast Cancer Awareness” marketing continues full-tilt, as it has since 1985, when the pharmaceutical giant Zeneca started National Breast Cancer Awareness Month (NBCAM). Since then, the boundaries between consciousness-raising and advertising have disappeared. Breast cancer is now a profitable marketing tool for thousands of products, all decorated with pink. “Shop for the cure” is an apparently irresistible lure to millions of consumers.
But even as corporate sponsors raked in profits from selling pink-beribboned goods, and collected millions of dollars in participation fees from women who walked, ran, pedaled, and paddled for the elusive cure, observers were questioning the value of what the journalist Barbara Ehrenreich, in 1991, called “The Cult of Pink Kitsch.”
In 1993, Monte Paulsen in “The BCAM Scam” for The Nation, wrote that Breast Cancer Awareness Month was “conceived and paid for by a British chemical company that both profits from this epidemic, and may be contributing to its cause.” Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI), the parent company of Zeneca, spent millions on Breast Cancer Awareness Month – while pouring paints, polymers and other compounds by the ton into the environment. ICI’s message from the beginning was: “Early detection is your best protection.”
Perilously Unaware
A 1997 editorial in the Chicago Tribune said, “Awareness month keeps women perilously unaware,” challenging the program’s direction: “Unfortunately, the primary focus of NBCAM reveals profoundly misguided priorities and a disturbing lack of commitment to prevention.” The knowledge that cancers are caused by carcinogens had for decades been the point of anti-tobacco campaigns. Lung cancer was known to be preventable, by stopping exposure to tobacco and to carcinogens like asbestos.
But the pink-ribbon movement, focusing on “early diagnosis,” seemed to assume that the main risk for breast cancer was having breasts. The growing breast-cancer industry lulled millions of women into thinking that mammograms were prevention.
Environmental breast carcinogens have been known for decades. In 1977, the National Cancer Institute warned about the estrogen-mimicking, cancer-causing effect of growth-promoting additives in cattle feed, and in pesticides like chlordane, DDT, and PCBs. In 1992, the Los Angeles Times reported that breast cancer deaths in young women had dropped by 30 percent following bans on DDT and related pesticides.
Among other recognized breast carcinogens are radiation, including X-rays and nuclear-plant waste; pollutants from vehicle exhaust; and many industrial chemicals that end up in the food chain or the water supply and accumulate in breast cells. In 2004, the National Cancer Institute released a paper which stated that “the majority of cancers are linked to the environment” and that, “in principle, they can be prevented.” But the Cancer Prevention Coalition estimates that prevention receives only about 5 percent of the Institute’s annual $1.8 billion budget.
The Allure of “The Cure”
Prevention of breast cancer has lagged far behind the industry’s obsession with the so-called cure. The interest is now at the molecular, genetic level. In a sense, all cancers are genetic. A carcinogen – some unfriendly molecule – invades the cell, attaches itself to the complex coil of cellular DNA, and reprograms the cell to reproduce a bunch of dysfunctional cells. This happens all the time. But the cells of our immune system are programmed to engulf and digest these invaders, just as they attack bacteria and viruses that try to make us sick. Mostly, our immune cells win. But if our cells are saturated with toxins and keep producing these aberrant clones, the immune system can’t keep up. The invasive cells settle in, and there’s a tumor in the making.
The genetic focus on drugs for “the cure” is aimed at the genetic level – finding drugs that will block the expression of tumor cells without harming normal cells. Most cancer drugs hit everything; that’s why chemotherapy makes people so horribly sick. This research is costly, time-consuming, and, so far, has yielded scant results. “The Cure” remains elusive.
But this focus on a cure in breast cancer research has been driven by the industries that cause the disease. The corporate sponsorship of breast-cancer research reads like a “Who’s Who” of major industrial polluters. The 1997 World Conference on Breast Cancer, in Kingston, Ontario, was sponsored by a long list of corporate heavyweights, including the chemical companies ARCO, Dow, and Hoechst Celanese; petrochemical conglomerates Ashland Oil, Atlantic Richfield, Exxon, Shell, and Texaco; General Motors and Ford; and Big Pharma giants Astra USA, Glaxo Wellcome, and Merck. Activist Janette D. Sherman, M.D., wrote, “Can this lack of attention to toxic chemicals and nuclear radiation as factors in causation of cancer be in any way connected to the sponsors listed on the program?”
The Komen Foundation, the leader in the “Race For The Cure,” continues to partner with heavy industry: 3M, ACH Foods, Kraft, Nestlé, The Mohawk Group, BMW, and the pharmaceutical giant Wyeth. And, this year, the FDA again approved the use of hormonal feed additives, implants, and injectables for growth promotion in beef, pork, and veal.
Change Is Coming
The work of preventing breast cancer is happening outside the medical-pharmaceutical-industrial complex, in environmental and epidemiological circles. The 5th Annual Early Environmental Exposures Conference takes place November 13-14, 2008 in Birmingham, Alabama. The program includes the Breast Cancer and Environment Research Centers network, which will present studies about the effects of early environmental exposures on breast development and on the risk of breast cancer in later life.
The activist group Breast Cancer Action continues to push for nationwide chemical policy reform and regulation of harmful and untested chemicals. BCA is also a leader in challenging the “pinkwashing” of cosmetics companies, automakers, and other industrial polluters who use the pink ribbon as a marketing tool, but whose products contain known breast carcinogens.
Awareness of the public health toll of industrial chemicals continues to evolve. In August 2008, President Bush signed a bill curbing – but not banning – the use of breast-carcinogenic phthalates in children’s toys. Overall, cancer death rates have been decreasing since the early 1990s, due, in part, to earlier diagnosis and better treatments, but also perhaps in response to incremental environmental clean-up. To be truly effective, the pink-ribbon movement needs to go green.
By Katharine Hikel; for original article see
www.vermontwoman.com/articles/0204/tangled-in-pink.shtml.
Grace Paley
(Dec. 11, 1922-Aug. 22, 2007)
Writer, political activist, and Vermont’s Poet Laureate 2003.
Just months before her death from breast cancer, Ms. Paley graciously welcomed us into her home for what would be one of her very last interviews (see May 2007 issue, www.vermontwoman.com/articles/0507/GracePaley.shtml). Despite her illness, Paley spent the last weeks of her life doing what she always did: writing, protesting war, giving public poetry readings both far from and near to home. According to her daughter Nora Paley, efforts are underway for the Grace Paley Legacy, to include an award to a community college adjunct professor or student working in the spirit of Paley’s life; and establishing a library of non-violent resistance. On Dec. 11, Paley’s birthday, readings of her work will be held in her honor at libraries and bookstores far and wide.
See the current print edition of Vermont Woman for memorial tributes to Jean Ankeney, Sara Gear Boyd, Rachel Bissex, Deborah Pickman Clifford, Liz Jeffords, Margaret MacArthur, Tasha Tudor, and Ginny Winn.
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