If you’ve never heard of a breast cancer virus, you’re not alone. Dr. Kathleen Ruddy says she wasn’t taught anything about it in med school or as she became a world recognized expert in breast cancer. Today, she says science has inexplicably dropped the ball on a fascinating and important area of research that points to a very real possibility that some breast cancer — like some cervical cancer — may be caused by a virus. Dr. Ruddy is a breast cancer surgeon and author of “The End of Breast Cancer: A Virus and the Hope for a Vaccine.”

The following is a transcript of a report from “Full Measure with Sharyl Attkisson.”
Watch the video by clicking the link at the end of the page.

Dr. Ruddy: I discovered it years after I had finished my fellowship at Memorial Sloan Kettering. Never heard about the breast cancer virus. And when I first became aware of it, I was like, “You’ve got to be kidding me.” I mean, I did my fellowship at Memorial Sloan Kettering. I’m like a breast cancer expert. Why didn’t I know about this? I’m looking at my textbooks. I’m looking in textbooks on pathology. I can find nothing about this. And I’m like, there’s a hundred years worth of research on the breast cancer virus. Why has this not moved forward? And that got me looking throughout the history of the whole discovery. The breast cancer virus, which was discovered in mice by John Bittner in 1936, was found to be passed from — in mice — from mothers to their offspring, both male and female, in breast milk. It was also found to be spread by the males in sexual intercourse. Just fascinating.

Sharyl: Does this mean that women can catch breast cancer?

Dr. Ruddy: Well, that’s a good question. Where do you get it? So, you know, we know that the mice got it from their mothers, or they got it indirectly from their sexual partners. The research was headed in the direction of answering these questions. If the breast cancer virus exists in women, and there certainly seems to be compelling evidence that it does, how are women getting it? Are they getting it because they acquired it because their mothers breast-fed them? Are they getting it through sexual transmission? Are they getting it, you know, one person — a kissing disease? How are they getting the virus? It’s a question that needs to be answered. There’s a lot of research that’s left to do to answer the question, “Does a virus cause breast cancer in women?” We can answer that question. If we chose to answer that question, we could answer that question. 

Sharyl: What are the implications if a virus does cause breast cancer in women?

Dr. Ruddy: Well, I think there are a lot of possible interventions. One would be to screen for it. One would be to develop a proper vaccine that was properly tested and evaluated and found to be truly safe and effective.

Sharyl: Obviously, as you said, this should be researched, but what can be done in the short term? 

Dr. Ruddy: Nothing can be done in the short term until we complete the job of the research. There’s only really one step left to complete the research. And this is how they proved that HPV causes cervical cancer, by the way. If you find that the women who became infected with the virus have an increased risk of breast cancer, that’s the last step. All the other six steps have been done to prove that the virus causes breast cancer in women. You just need to do that. I think that the National Cancer Institute should do that. I mean, it’s breast cancer, for crying out loud. It’s the number-one cause of cancer in women. Right? You can’t break free of all that money that you’re sloshing around and spend money to answer the question, to do the last evaluation, to prove that this virus causes breast cancer in women? You can’t do that? You’re not giving me a good reason why you can’t do that.

Sharyl (on-camera): The number of women getting diagnosed with breast cancer at some point in their lifetime is one in eight, according to the American Cancer Society.

Watch video here.

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