Breast cancer charity attacked for tie-up with wine company

Scientists have criticised a breast cancer charity for letting a wine company use the charity's name in an advertising campaign to promote the consumption of alcohol ­ a known risk factor in developing the disease.

The Breast Cancer Campaign is receiving more than £50,000 from BRL Hardy, a producer of Australian wine, to allow the company to put the charity's logo on bottles.

Hardy will also be working with the charity on a number of fund-raising initiatives, which have already included a "stamp out breast cancer wine-tasting" attended by celebrities such as the wine expert Jilly Goolden, the comedienne Jo Brand and the television gardener Charlie Dimmock.

The Breast Cancer Campaign said money raised from such events would be used for research into the disease as well as raising public awareness of a cancer that killed 12,800 in the UK each year.

Medical researchers said the tie-up between a cancer charity and Hardy was crass given that the overwhelming evidence of a link between alcohol and breast cancer first began to emerge five years ago and was confirmed in a study published in November.

Tom Sanders, professor of nutrition and dietetics at King's College London, who is a government adviser on food and diet, said: "As alcohol intake is linked to increased risk of breast cancer, it is rather like putting an ad for a lung charity on cigarette packets.

"It is extremely ill-advised of the breast cancer charity to get involved with a wine company, which is, after all, trying to promote the consumption of alcohol. It sends out a confusing message to women about the risks they run."

Pamela Goldberg, chief executive of the Breast Cancer Campaign, denied that the tie-up could be compared to a deal with a tobacco company. "It's not like smoking and lung cancer. We know that smoking causes disease. This is not a causal link, it's a slight increase in risk," she said.

"The increase in risk of drinking a couple of glasses of wine a day is less than the increase in risk of not having a child. We are not going to go out and say to women, 'to reduce your risk of breast cancer you must have a child'," she said.

Adrian McKeon, a director of Hardy, said: "When we started off the connection [with the charity] there was no concrete evidence for a link between alcohol and breast cancer."