What is the Impact of Cancer on Society? What are the Stated Causes of Cancer?

[Guest guest]

An interview with Dr. Samuel Epstein

http://www.preventcancer.com/publications/pdf/Interview%20%20June%2003.htm

 

By David Ross

 

Dr. Samuel Epstein is professor emeritus of environmental medicine at the

University of Illinois School of Public Health, and Chairman of the Cancer

Prevention Coalition (www.preventcancer.com). He has published some 260 peer

reviewed articles, and authored or co-authored 10 books including the

prize-winning The Politics of Cancer in, The Safe Shopper's Bible, The Breast

Cancer Prevention Program in, and The Politics of Cancer, Revisited. Dr. Epstein

has worked at the congressional level providing testimony, consulting, and

drafting of legislation. For decades he has doggedly exposed the National Cancer

Institute and the American Cancer Society for losing the winnable war on cancer.

 

 

 

 

 

David Ross: What is the impact of cancer on society? And secondly, what are the

stated causes of cancer?

 

 

 

Dr. Samuel Epstein: Over recent decades, the incidence of cancer has escalated

to epidemic proportions, now striking nearly one in every two men, and over one

in every three women in their lifetimes. Even more disturbing is the recent

recognition that the very high incidence of cancer is going to increase further

still, and by the year 2050, it will be doubling the current very high incidence

rate.

 

You may say, “Well, what’s going on here, is it perhaps because people are

living longer that they’re getting more cancers?” The answer to that is no,

because when we talk about cancer incidence rates, we adjust them to reflect the

increasing longevity of the population.

 

The public is under the general impression that the real increase in cancer

rates are due to smoking, and there’s no question that smoking is the single

most important cause of all cancer. However, when you look at the data, over the

last few decades, lung cancer and other smoking related cancers account for

between only a third and a quarter of the increased incidence of all cancers.

Incidentally, the incidence of lung cancer in men is sharply being reduced

because men are giving up smoking, while in women it is increasing,

unfortunately.

 

Let me give you a few figures to give you an idea of some of the other cancers

whose rates are shooting up. If you look at a cancer called non-Hodgkin’s

lymphoma (the cancer from which Jackie Kennedy died), over the last few decades,

the incidence has gone up by nearly 100 percent. When you look at brain cancer,

the incidence has gone up about 80 or 90 percent. When you look at breast

cancer, it’s gone up something like 60 or 65 percent. When you look at

testicular cancer, particularly in men between the ages of 28-35, it’s gone up,

believe it or not, nearly 300 percent. When you look at childhood cancers,

depending on what particular kind of childhood cancer you look at, the incidence

has gone up as high as 40-50 percent. These are all non-smoking cancers. So you

can’t really, in any way, explain them away on the basis of smoking.

 

Can genetics be the possible reason for this major increase in cancer? Not at

all, there’s no chance whatsoever that the genetics of human populations have

changed in the last 40-50 years. It takes tens of thousands of years for genetic

effects in the general population to change. So one can exclude genetics and

sharply limit the role of smoking. So what are you left with?

 

What about fatty diet? There’s really little evidence that fat, itself, is a

risk factor for cancer. For instance, if you look at Mediterranean countries,

they have extremely high fat consumption, particularly olive oil. Olive oil can

be as high as 40 percent of the diet. But the rates of cancers, particularly

reproductive cancers are low. However, when you look at animal fats and dairy

fats, that’s very different. You find strong relationships between consumption

of animal and dairy fats and some cancers. But that’s a reflection of the fact

that these are highly contaminated with a wide range of industrial, chemical and

petrochemical carcinogens.

 

So, the first point I would make is that there has been a massive escalation in

the incidence of cancer, and this cannot be explained away on the basis of

longevity, smoking, or genetics.

 

Is the reason why we’re seeing this enormous increase because there isn’t the

money to pay for the research necessary to investigate all the causes of cancer

and to give the public, Congress and the regulating industries this information?

Not on your life. In fact, if you look at the finances of the National Cancer

Institute (NCI) and the American Cancer Society (ACS), you find the following:

When President Nixon declared the war against cancer in 1971, the annual budget

of the NCI was about $180 million. Now, the budget is $4.6 billion dollars a

year. That’s a thirty-fold increase. Similarly, the budget of the ACS has been

escalating, and it’s now near $800 million a year while they have about $1

billion dollars of assets in cash and other reserves. The NCI and the ACS

compose what we call the “cancer establishment:” The NCI is a governmental or

federal institution, which you as taxpayers pay for with your tax dollars, and

the ACS is the world’s largest non-profit so-called

“charity.”

 

 

 

DR: What are the policies of the National Cancer Institute and the American

Cancer Society on the causes and prevention of cancer?

 

 

 

Dr. Samuel Epstein: First of all, they try to explain away cancer by what’s

called, “blame the victim.” If you get cancer, it’s your own fault. You smoke

too much. They’re absolutely right that smoking is an important cause of cancer,

but it doesn’t explain the massive, current epidemic. So, it’s not smoking.

Apart from smoking, they say, “Well, it’s a fatty diet.” I’ve already indicated

that fat, itself is not a risk factor for cancer. Or they claim it’s because

people are spending too much time in the sun. There’s no question at all that

malignant melanoma and skin cancer will result from spending too much time in

the sun, but that has nothing to do with any of the other major cancers that I

mentioned—brain cancer, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, breast, testicular and childhood

cancers. They parallel this emphasis on “blame the victim” by ignoring, to all

intents and purposes, a vast body of scientific information on avoidable causes

or risk factors of cancer.

 

What then are their policies? First of all, they confuse the public by using the

words “secondary prevention.” By that they mean screening, diagnosis, and the

use of chemicals, vitamins, etc. to help reduce cancer risks due to past

exposures to these carcinogens. So when they talk about how much money they

spent on prevention, not only is there gross exaggeration, but they also, by

using the word secondary prevention, grossly mislead the public. So the cancer

establishment is fixated on what I call, “damage control.” Damage control is the

screening, diagnosis and treatment of cancer, as opposed to prevention.

 

For example, occupation is a major cause of cancer in men and,to a lesser

extent, breast cancer in women. In children too, because children whose parents

work in plants during the pregnancy of the wife, have major excesses of

childhood cancer from carrying occupational carcinogens into the home and from

being exposed to carcinogens themselves which are absorbed into their

bloodstream.

 

As far as occupational cancer is concerned, of the $4.5 billion dollars a year,

the amount of money the NCI spends on in-house research on occupational cancer

is $15 million dollars, which is less than one percent. Of the ACS budget on

cancer prevention, the money spent on occupational, environmental, and other

preventable causes of cancer is less than 0.1 percent. So what we have, then, is

a situation in which the cancer establishment misleads the public: first of all,

by using the word secondary prevention; secondly, by spending peanuts on

research of the causes of cancer; and lastly, by failing to provide the public,

congress and regulatory agencies with a substantial body of well-documented

scientific information on avoidable causes of cancer.

 

Therefore, others and I charge the cancer establishment of major responsibility

for losing the winnable war against cancer. In examining the track record of the

ACS, which not only reflects indifference to cancer prevention, but actual

hostility to cancer prevention, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, the leading

American charity watchdog stated, “The American Cancer Society is more

interested in accumulating wealth than saving lives.”

 

 

 

DR: What are the conflicts of interest between the National Cancer Institute and

the American Cancer Society and industry?

 

 

 

Dr Epstein: The conflicts of interest extend particularly to the mammography

industry—the machine and film industry. Incidentally, we have excellent data

showing that pre-menopausal mammography is not only ineffective, but is also

dangerous for a variety of reasons including the high doses of radiation; two

films of a breast in a pre-menopausal woman, gives one about 500 times the dose

of a chest x-ray. If a pre-menopausal woman gets mammography every year over a

ten-year period, the dosages of radiation can well amount to about ten rads; a

rad is a “radiation absorbed dose,” a measure of radiation exposure. So,

radiation from routine premenopausal mammography reaches reasonably close to the

kind of dosage that women got in Hiroshima and Nagasaki outside of the major

epicenter where the atom bomb was exploded. So these are massive doses.

Nevertheless, when a radiologist will tell women when asked if there’s any

problem with the radiation, “Well my dear,” and they’ll call them by

their first name, “not at all. It’s just the same as spending a few days in

Denver or taking transatlantic flight.” This is frank deception and

manipulation. It’s not only with the mammography industry; the relationships

between the NCI, the ACS, and the cancer drug industry are a matter of record.

In fact, the previous director of the National Cancer Institute said we must

recognize that the NCI has become a governmental pharmaceutical industry. "

 

You and I as taxpayers pay for a great deal of research on drugs for cancer

treatment. What happens when the research and development is done? When a drug

starts looking hopeful, that drug and all its backup research is then passed on

to Industry that charges massively high prices to consumers. For instance,

citizens paid for the research and development of a drug like Taxol, and then

it’s passed over to Bristol Meyers Squibb who can charge up to 30-50 times more

for the same drug. So the taxpayer pays twice.

 

 

 

D.R: If we can’t explain this major epidemic of cancer on the basis of smoking,

genetics or lifestyle, what are the real reasons for it?

 

 

 

Dr. Epstein: Well, they fall into three general categories. The first is

relatively easily avoidable if the public was given information and this relates

in particular to consumer products. By consumer products, I mean things you can

buy in a store which include number one: food; secondly, cosmetics and

toiletries; and lastly, household products. In all of these areas, the consumer,

once given the information on which of these pose cancer risks, could boycott

them and shop for safer products. Then the manufacturers of these unsafe

products would be punished by a virtual boycott of their products. This would be

a powerful incentive for them to clean up their act. However, the American

cancer establishment denies the consumer this information.

 

How do you define democracy? One of the basic ways you define democracy is the

consumers right to know, the right to have information which impact adversely on

the health and welfare of their lives. Yet the cancer establishment, funded so

handsomely to the tune of over $4.5 billion dollars annually has this

information, fails to provide this information, and trivializes this information

when it comes out.

 

I’ll give you a few examples as far a food is concerned. First of all, animal

and dairy products are highly contaminated with a wide range of pesticides and

other industrial, chemical carcinogens. Take meat for instance. Apart from the

pesticides and industrial carcinogens, you have the sex hormones. Because cattle

in feedlots, 100 days to slaughter, are implanted with sex hormones such as

estradiol in their ear, and from which high residues are left in the meat that

you eat. These are very important risk factors for reproductive

cancers—testicular cancers in men, breast cancers in women, and leukemia in

children.

 

Children love hotdogs. Hotdogs are dyed pink and red with nitrite, and the

nitrite reacts with certain amines—chemicals naturally present in food—to

produce highly potent carcinogens, known as nitrosamines. We have the chemical

data showing that nitrosamines are found in nitrite-dyed hot dogs, and we also

have what’s called epidemiological studies on children showing that children who

eat nitrite in their dyed hotdogs—which are the standard hotdog—have up to about

a three- to four-fold increased incidence of brain cancer, and about a six to

seven-fold increase incidence of leukemia.

 

Apart from that, most of the milk in the country is contaminated. It comes from

cows that have been injected with a genetically engineered growth hormone to

increase their production of milk, and this hormone increases levels of a

natural growth factor, known as IGF1. So the milk becomes supercharged by this

growth factor, which in high levels has been clearly associated with breast

cancer, prostate cancer, and colon cancer.

 

Aside from food, you’ve got cosmetics and toiletries. Cosmetics and toiletries

are literally a witches’ brew of undisclosed carcinogens. When you look at the

label on the back of a bottle of shampoo, you see about 20 chemicals listed.

This means nothing to anybody because there’s no indication as to which of these

chemicals are carcinogens.

 

These chemicals fall into three categories. There are ingredients which are

carcinogenic themselves like talcum powder. Women, particularly pre-menopausal

women that dust their genitals areas with talc after showering and bathing, have

up to a three to four-fold increased incidence in ovarian cancer. In addition to

ingredients, which are carcinogenic themselves, you have other ingredients which

themselves are not carcinogenic, but which break down to release carcinogens

like formaldehyde. Or you have other ingredients, which themselves are not

carcinogenic, but interact with each other to form carcinogens. Are woman

informed? Not at all. In fact, our coalition put out a citizen’s petition to the

Food and Drug Administration demanding labeling. What did they do? Nothing at

all.

 

One other area of consumer products besides foods, cosmetics and toiletries, is

household products. For instance, there’s a deodorizer a lot of people use in

their toilets, bathrooms and elsewhere called Para. This is dichlorobenzene.

This is a highly volatile, highly potent carcinogen. But there’s no warning

whatsoever about this.

 

Pesticides in the home, lawn or garden are very risky indeed. If you use

pesticides in and around the home, your dog will have a five-fold increased risk

of getting a not uncommon cancer in dogs called canine lymphoma. Far more

importantly, there are major excesses of childhood cancers where pesticides are

used in and around the home, lawn or garden, or if you use pet collars

containing chemicals, which are carcinogens.

 

So these are the three areas of consumer products for which the consumer, given

a choice, could reduce his or her risk, but they are denied this information by

the cancer establishment—a fundamental violation of the democratic right to

know. So that’s the first category, the category in which the public could

easily reduce their own risk of cancer.

 

The second is medical drugs—drugs given to you by your doctor. There is the

requirement for informed consent. When your doctor gives you a drug, you are

entitled to be given the basic information as to the dangers of these drugs. But

in general, you’re not. First of all, the drug companies do not provide doctors

this information or the information is trivialized. And secondly, they’re not

provided this information by the cancer establishment.

 

Let me give you some examples of this. Ritalin, for instance, is a drug widely

used for Attention Deficit Disorder in children. We use about ten times more per

capita in American than any other country in the world. If a child misbehaves in

school, the parent is told that the child has Attention Deficit Disorder and the

doctor prescribes Ritalin, which is a highly dangerous carcinogenic drug, and

which also has been shown to induce very aggressive liver cancers in rodents.

Are parents informed of this? No.

 

Then you’ve got Evista or Raloxifene, which is the trade name. It is widely

prescribed by Ely Lily for osteoporosis—millions of women the world over get it.

There’s clear-cut data, which Ely Lily has admitted in its own internal

confidential information, that Evista induces ovarian cancer. Yet the public is

not informed about this, and the NCI doesn’t provide the public with any

information. If the public were to get the full information about the drugs

before they accepted them, then they would exercise their options. So again,

it’s a denial of the right to know and the lack of informed consent.

 

Let me give you another example of this, which will make it clearer still. When

estrogen-based drugs are used for estrogen replacement therapy, particularly the

estrogen drug alone without the testosterone, you get risks of uterine cancer in

1 in every 100 women after 10 years. This is a very high risk. It’s much greater

than the 1 in 250 annual incidence of lung cancer in heavy smokers.

 

Let’s move on to the third category. What I want to talk about now is domestic,

chemical terrorism. The petrochemical and other industries have contaminated the

totality of our environment—our air, our water, the workplace, and our

foodstuff, with a wide range of petrochemical and other carcinogens. They have

done this knowing full well that these chemicals are carcinogenic. They have

failed to inform the public. They have done this to increase their profits. This

relates to not only the petrochemical industries, but also the mining industries

and other industries particularly in medical radiation. So we have, essentially,

domestic terrorism in which, whether you like it or not, in the air you breathe,

in the water you drink—quite apart from consumer products—you are being

subjected to chemical—I use the word loosely and with a certain hesitancy—but

this is the equivalent to chemical warfare, because, are you told about these

risks? No. Why are you being subjected to these risks? It

is for the profit of corporations that could, relatively easily, by what’s

called “toxic use reduction,” phase out the use of chemical carcinogens and

substitute them with much safer chemicals.

 

I really haven’t dealt sufficiently with labor, but occupational exposures to

carcinogens are the single most important cause of cancer in the country, not

only for men but also for women. We know that probably one million women are

exposed in the workplace to chemicals that induce breast cancer, but also, as I

mentioned earlier, to childhood cancers. So here we have a situation in which

the total population is exposed to these carcinogens.

 

 

 

DR: How can “toxic use reduction” be implemented?

 

 

 

Dr. Epstein: In 1989, the commonwealth of Massachusetts passed a Toxic Use

Reduction Act, in which a group of responsible industries got together with

citizen and environmental groups, and the University of Massachusetts. They

worked together to show that it’s possible to make products safely and to phase

out the use of carcinogenic chemicals and replace them with safe chemicals. Over

the last decade or so, there’s been a phenomenal reduction in the use of

carcinogenic chemicals and hazardous waste in Massachusetts. If the rest of the

country were to follow the example of Massachusetts and phase out the use of

carcinogenic chemicals, you would find a massive reduction in cancer rates.

 

But you won’t find this until governors of states take action. Governors of

states depend on the cancer establishment for their information, but the cancer

establishment remains silent. So I charge the cancer establishment with tacit

allowance of a campaign by the chemical industry to increase profits at the risk

of public health. They play a major role in the responsibility for losing a

winnable war against cancer.

 

In this connection, I would like to let your readers know that the Cancer

Prevention Coalition created a report known as " The Stop Cancer Before It Starts

Campaign " (February 2003). It’s basically a formula for winning the losing war

against cancer. You’ll find one version of this on our website,

www.preventcancer.com. Nearly 100 top-notch independent experts in cancer and

cancer prevention have endorsed this campaign. Environmental, consumer, public

interest, and labor groups have also endorsed it.

 

The “Stop Cancer Before It Starts” campaign has been sponsored by socially

responsible business, which are phasing out or have phased out carcinogens from

their products. If there are any representatives of citizens groups or public

interest groups who want to join us, please email me at epstein.

 

Let me emphasize once again: What we hear day after day is talk of war, and one

reason for the talk of war is because of terrorism—chemical terrorism, nuclear

terrorism or biological terrorism, when we tolerate domestic chemical terrorism,

which is largely responsible for this massive epidemic of cancer. Yet we, the

greatest democracy in the world, allow this. We really need to charge the

executives, the managers, and the chemists of these corporations with criminal

conspiracy for chemical terrorism in the nation.

 

I assure you, I’m not using these words loosely. I’ve spent a lifetime in this

field. I started off my career as a pathologist. I’ve done God knows how many

autopsies of people who’ve died of cancer, and I’ve watched this whole field of

cancer policy, the NCI and the ACS. I’ve seen the money that we throw at them.

I’ve seen their escalating budgets, their indifference, and their hostility.

 

Frankly, if I was a member of the general public, and read this for the first

time, I would be a little skeptical, and you have a right to be. But you will

find the detailed documentation, not only in my 1998 book, The Politics of

Cancer, Revisited, but also in our newest press releases and in the latest

campaign which can be found on our website, www.preventcancer.com. So for those

of you who are representatives of labor, citizen groups, environmental groups

and public interest groups, we welcome you to join us.

 

 

 

 

 

David Ross does a talk show on KMUD radio in Redway, CA. He has worked on the

Ralph Nader presidential campaign, corporate malfeasance, U.S. foreign policy

and environmental issues. He can be reached at daveross27.

 

 

Editor:

Dave Ross

daveross27

 

June 2003

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