Exposure to Pesticides and Breast Cancer Revisited

Pesticide use raises a number of environmental health concerns for the general public as pesticides are commonly used to increase agricultural productivity and control invading insects, weeds, fungi and rodents (Jurewicz et al., 2006). Pesticides have been suspected to present danger to consumers and bystanders, as well as workers during the manufacturing and transporting process of these chemicals. This is a problem of great significance because if pesticides do play a role in the etiologies of breast cancer, many people are put at an increased risk in their daily lives by consuming and inhaling such toxins. Due to the fact that pesticide exposure is so widespread in the general population and breast cancer is the most common cancer among women, it remains extremely important to determine whether pesticide exposure contributes to an increased risk of breast cancer (Brody et al., 2004). The purpose of this paper is to review scholarly literature on the epidemiologic relationship between exposure to pesticides and the subsequent development of breast cancer