OK, we all know young women get breast cancer. But the way some talk about the pair -- young women and the deadly disease -- it would seem finding a young one living with this type of cancer is like locating that needle in a haystack. Many a young woman -- like me -- have heard doctors and nurses and technicians and family and friends remark, "you are too young for the disease," and then dismiss cancer suspicions as needless worry.

The median age for women diagnosed with breast cancer is 65. But think about this fact, published in the Spring/Summer edition of Beyond: Live & Thrive After Breast Cancer.

More than 240,000 women in the United States age 40 and under are living with breast cancer. Each year in this country, more than 14,000 women 40 years old and younger are diagnosed with breast cancer, says Boston oncologist Ann Partridge, M.D., of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

That's a lot of young women. That's a lot of breast cancer. And yet, mammograms still are not recommended for women under the age of 40.

What are the odds? Six women working in the same hospital laboratory have been diagnosed with cancer -- and one of the women has already died. Naturally, the other five women are nervous. During the 1970s and 1980s, six women worked together as technicians in the sterile environment of the Mission Memorial Hospital searching for infections or evidence of diseases like leukemia, identifying electrolytes and white blood counts. Within a span of four years, one by one, all six were diagnosed with cancer.

According to one of the six women diagnosed with breast cancer, they were exposed to hazardous toxins and toxic fumes as maintenance workers burned biohazardous medical wastes, plastic IV bags and tubes, petrie dishes, syringes, and infectious materials in the incinerator near the lab. The Occupational Health and Safety Agency for Healthcare in B.C. (OHSAH) recently conducted a preliminary investigation of 63 technicians and acknowledges there is a cancer cluster tied to the lab. Further investigation is needed to determine the extent of the damage caused to the health of all those exposed. Of the 63 lab workers, the cancers include -- breast, ovarian, liver, thyroid, lymphoma, and skin cancer. If you would like to read more on how this could happen, and what exactly the maintenance workers were burning that created the toxic fumes, go here.