FAIRBANKS - Jeanne Rizzo wants people to understand that breast cancer isn’t caused by just genetics.

Environmental factors, and specifically chemicals, may be contributing as well. Rizzo, who will speak Thursday in Fairbanks, is the president and CEO of the Breast Cancer Fund.

For the last two decades the organization has been working to find the causes of breast cancer and to inform people about the disease.

The lecture, part of a national tour, is sponsored by the Alaska Community Action on Toxics and the Alaska Run for Women.

One in eight women will develop breast cancer, up from one in 44 during the 1930s, Rizzo said.

Alaska has a higher breast cancer mortality rate than the national average.

Rizzo advocates for the elimination of the environmental and other preventable causes of the disease. She said breast cancer is being seen more and more as a chronic disease, despite the fact that younger women in their 20s and 30s are contracting it.

“This is not the period of one’s life when you expect cancer to develop,” Rizzo said.

Her talk will focus on what people can do to avoid the chemicals suspected of causing the disease and how they can encourage lawmakers to better regulate the chemicals.

Several bills are being considered at the national level that would affect how chemicals are regulated. Rizzo said that 80,000 chemicals have been tested in the U.S., but the FDA has only banned nine. In comparison, Europe has taken steps to ban 1,100.

“We have this chemical management system that doesn’t look at the long term,” she said.

But Rizzo said that even if changes aren’t made at the national level, people can still make choices at the consumer level. She said that in California it was next to impossible to find plastic baby bottles containing the chemical bisphenol A (more commonly known as BPA), a chemical known to have damaging effects on human hormones, because consumers demanded their products be BPA free.

“The more the conversation happens, it changes how people think about it,” she said. “That changes the marketplace.”

She hopes people are empowered by the knowledge she presents.

“You can do some things to protect your family,” she said.

“But where you can’t, you can work on policy.”

Contact features writer Suzanna Caldwell at 459-7504. IF YOU GO

What: Rachel Carson Commemorative Lecture with Breast Cancer Fund president Jeanne Rizzo

When: Reception at 6:30 p.m.; lecture begins at 7 p.m. Thursday

Where: Schaible Auditorium, University of Alaska Fairbanks Bunnell Building

Tickets: Free

Information: www.breastcancerfund.org