Day 034 - 11 Oct 94 - Page 22
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2 MR. JUSTICE BELL: I have to say there are also some others
3 because I read all the abstracts last night, not the body
4 of the reports, but all the head notes.
5
6 MR. MORRIS: On all the references?
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8 MR. JUSTICE BELL: Yes. There are some other missing ones, but
9 what I suggest you do is if you take my bundle at five
10 past two and see if there are any others we have not got
11 to where I should have copies and have not.
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13 MR. MORRIS: Before we go on to the further references -- that
14 was immediately after the Surgeon General's report. So,
15 if we move on to one of Dr. Arnott's references, and we
16 keep that bundle available, which is Hirayama.
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18 MS. STEEL: It is No. 6 in Dr. Arnott's references.
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20 MR. MORRIS: This was referenced in your report, but it will be
21 missing in the file because it was already in the Arnott
22 file.
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24 MR. JUSTICE BELL: Very well, as long as I have it somewhere.
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26 MR. MORRIS: It is one of the missing ones. Would you like to
27 take us through the sections that are significant?
28 A. I will be very brief on this rather than take a very
29 large amount of time. I simply wanted to point out two
30 things in relation to this study. The first is the year
31 in which it took place. It was reported in 1978. So, the
32 results were already known and it was reported in the
33 National Research Council's report and has been referred
34 to in the Surgeon General's report as well, but it
35 illustrates the suspicion of a causative association
36 between fatty foods and breast cancer; that suspicion is
37 not new.
38
39 I would like to confine my comments simply to the
40 abstract, and if more details are needed we could look at
41 the body of the report, but unless there are questions
42 I will only look at the abstract.
43
44 At the beginning of the abstract the author states:
45 "Breast cancer is still relatively infrequent in Japan"
46 -- he is referring to late 1970s -- "However, both
47 mortality and morbidity rates have sharply increased in
48 recent years, especially in ages 45-59. The risk was
49 noted to be 8.5 times higher in women of high
50 socioeconomic strata eating meat daily compared with women
51 of low socioeconomic strata who do not eat meat daily,
52 when 142,857 women aged 40 years were followed for 10
53 years."
54
55 Skipping ahead, the author states: "The close correlation
56 with fat intake was noted to come mainly from the
57 consumption of pork and animal fat. The ratio of recent
58 increase in breast cancer death rates was also found to be
59 under the combined influence of animal fat and AF2", which
60 is a mutagenic food additive that was used in Japan; they
