Newswise — New York, NY - September 15, 2015 -- Breast Cancer kills one woman every minute. That’s a statistic internationally recognized breast cancer surgeon Dr. Kathleen Ruddy is intent on changing. That challenge starts with a question: Can a mouse virus cause breast cancer in women?
Answering that question has become Dr. Ruddy’s life’s work. With 100 years of research establishing that most breast cancer may well be virus-based, the answer is vital to the future of millions of women and men. As Dr. Ruddy, the first and only breast cancer specialist to compile this encyclopedic research in one volume, remarks, “If there’s a virus that causes breast cancer, and a safe and effective vaccine that can prevent this disease, we need to know about it now, not in another 100 years.”
Although one can trace the origins of breast cancer back some 5,000 years to when the Egyptians pictorially recorded the disease, it was the research of Dr. John Bittner who discovered a breast cancer virus in mice that marked a turning point, Dr. Ruddy explains. From that moment on there has been a long tangled path for research on the breast cancer virus to be taken seriously, despite the mounting evidence supporting this idea. After eight years of compiling and analyzing all available data, what has emerged, Dr. Ruddy believes, is compelling evidence that a virus found in a certain species of mice (Mouse Mammary Tumor Virus - MMTV) is responsible for up to 75% of human breast cancer.
Her new book, OF MICE AND WOMEN: Unraveling the Mystery of The Breast Cancer Virus (Breast Health and Healing Books, October 2015, $19.99, 298 pages) throws out a challenge to the mainstream medical community to seriously discuss a century of revelations about this disease.
OF MICE AND WOMEN by Dr. Kathleen T. Ruddy
At the heart of the story, as Dr. Ruddy writes in OF MICE AND WOMEN, lies the decision to focus cancer research on treatment rather than investigation of the causes. The book reveals that research on
the breast cancer virus has dwindled drastically over the past decades. Causes, prevention, and research on tumor viruses were put aside, she says, to prioritize treatment in the hope of finding a cure. Unfortunately, after forty years racing to find a cure that goal still remains elusive.
That tumors can be virus-based was established as long ago as 1911, but work on tumor viruses was rescued from obscurity by Dr. Harald Zur Hausen when he proved to a world of skeptics that the human papilloma virus (HPV) causes cervical cancer. And as recently as July 2015, sixteen scientists from three countries (Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Italy) published a paper about the breast cancer virus in the peer-reviewed journal, Oncotarget. They confirmed the presence of the mouse-borne virus in human saliva and in human salivary glands and support the hypothesis of a viral origin for human breast carcinomas. This hypothesis is all but proven, and a serious discussion about developing a vaccine to prevent breast cancer needs to urgently take place. The stakes could not be higher: a diagnosis of breast cancer is a death sentence for half of the women in the world and a burdensome threat for all.
With OF MICE AND WOMEN, Dr. Ruddy is issuing a call to action: it’s time to complete the research on the human breast cancer virus -- an arena that has for decades been under-reported and under-funded. There is little doubt that we are on the frontier of a major step forward in breast cancer prevention.
Dr. Kathleen Ruddy is a breast cancer surgeon trained at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. She was Founder and Medical Director of the Breast Service for Barnabas Health (Clara Maass Medical Center: 1995-2005). Dr. Ruddy received her International Masters in Health Leadership from McGill University (2008). She is the founder of Breast Health & Healing Foundation (2008) whose mission is “To discover the specific causes of breast cancer and to use that knowledge to prevent the disease,” and an esteemed member of the Leadership Council of the Harvard School of Public Health. Dr. Ruddy is presently working on a full-length documentary film about the breast cancer virus and the world’s first preventive breast cancer vaccine developed at the Cleveland Clinic in 2010. www.pinkvirus.org
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