Hamster Study Leads to 'Condoms Cause Cancer' Rumors

Kelly Jakubowski is a senior journalism major from Conroe. The opinions in this column are hers.

Rumor of the week: condoms cause cancer.

This one could be dangerous, because it has right-wing abstinence preachers screaming that condoms do more harm than good.  

I'm not saying that the hippie free love principle is the way to go, merely that good information is owed to the public, and while protected sex is only "safER sex," good information often leads to better choices.

For more information, I contacted the Centers for Disease Control, the World Health Organization, the National Institute of Health, the National Cancer Institute and the Food and Drug Administration.

Most of them hadn't even heard of the study, which is a shame, because it's frequently cited on abstinence-only Web sites.

The Centers for Disease Control directed me to PubMed, a service of the National Library of Medicine and National Institute of Health. It lists the abstract of most published experiments.

The 2005 German study found carcinogens--cancer-causing agents--in condoms. They are called nitrosamines, and they are also found in balloons and baby pacifiers.

Different Web sites claim that nitrosamines are either allowed in controlled amounts in certain products or not regulated at all, depending on the country.

The American Council on Science and Health, in an article about cigarette smoke, claims that nitrosamines are regulated in the U.S. Products like beer, bacon and baby bottle nipples must stay under 10 parts per billion.

To find the amount in condoms, researchers immersed different products in artificial sweat and artificial saliva to bring the nitrosamines out of the products, and then measured the results.

PubMed posted information taken directly from the study. It said researchers assumed a human might be exposed to condom contact 1,500 times in a lifetime- 50 times a year for 30 years- and came up with .9 micrograms of nitrosamines per lifetime as a reasonable number. They then applied one gram of the substance to some poor hamsters, who didn't even get their condom exposure the old-fashioned way. The hamsters developed tumors, particularly of the liver.

However, according to PubMed, " this dose exceeds the dose to be expected from contact with condoms by more than one million. Also, epidemiological studies do not support a role for condoms in the induction of cancer. The incidence of cervical cancer and liver tumors is high in developing countries, where condoms are seldom used. In addition, humans are regularly exposed to nitrosamines from food and tobacco smoke at a dose which is 1,000 to 10,000 fold higher than expected from condom use. In summary, the risk for the induction of tumors from nitrosamines in condoms is very low."

Part 2 of this report will deal with condoms at SHSU.

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SHSU Media Contact: Kelly Jakubowski
March 22, 2006
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