The run for the cure... sponsored by the cause!

[Guest guest]

[This is one of my favorite articles, I'm reminded of it every year the

hospital lotteries start advertising]

 

Cars and Cancer

Liz Armstrong

 

Writer, Activist, Member of BCPC

http://www.stopcancer.org/voices/armstrong.html

 

Here in Ontario, we have one lottery that's exclusively devoted to raising

funds for cancer research. It's called the Cash & Cars Lottery, and for the

price of a $100 ticket - only 300,000 are sold - you're eligible for the

big jackpot of $3 million in 'cold, hard cash' or a bunch of smaller but

still impressive payouts. Then again, you might snag one of the many flashy

cars - a 2003 Porsche Coupe or a Maserati Spyder, or a Lexus or Jaguar.

 

Your chance of winning a prize in Cash & Cars is about one in 15. Pretty

good odds, right? But they're not nearly so high as your chances of

actually getting cancer - not even close. One in every three of us (not

just Ontarians; this goes for you good folk in BC too) will be diagnosed

with cancer at some point during our lives. It's one in two if you count

non-melanoma skin cancers caused by too much exposure to the sun in our

ozone-depleted world. One in four Canadians will die from cancer - you

probably know several who have 'lost their courageous battles' with cancer

far too young.

 

Here's the sad irony. Automobiles themselves - those coveted Cash & Cars

prizes - cause cancer. There's benzene in gasoline, which is a known human

carcinogen. Then there's formaldehyde and diesel particulates, and others

with mind-numbing names like acetaldehyde,1,3-butadiene and polycyclic

aromatic hydrocarbons - all on the World Health Organization's human

carcinogen list. Vinyl chloride, used to make PVC plastics for car

upholstery and underseal, causes liver cancer. And so on.

 

The car company Honda used to sponsor the Run for the Cure here in Ontario,

prompting one of my more waggish friends to come up with a new slogan for

the event: " Run for the cure, sponsored by the cause. " (Honda is no longer

chief patron of the run; now it's CIBC, but Ford of Canada is right in

there as a secondary sponsor).

 

One in three. If cancer were a contagious disease, we'd have no trouble

calling it an epidemic. Short of that, we can certainly say it's a

grievous, heart-wrenching, very costly, preventable tragedy.

 

Preventable? Cancer is preventable? Why do we so rarely hear about

preventable cancers, except when it comes to smoking, or maybe eating more

fruits and veggies? Certainly not about cars.

 

In the1950s, widely respected scientist John Higginson of theWorld Health

Organization wrote that 70 to 80 per cent of all cancers were

'environmental' and therefore avoidable. His aim was mainly to rebut the

prevailing belief that cancer was a random act of awful luck, or the result

of faulty genes, or of simply growing old. By environmental, Higginson

didn't mean just the poisons spewing out of factory smoke stacks or car

exhaust - the usual things we now think of as environmental. Rather, he

considered 'environment' as the sum total of our life experience - where we

live and work, whether we're rich or poor, if we smoke or drink alcohol,

the quality of the food we eat, the water we drink, the air we breathe,

etc. Professor emeritus of biology at Hamilton's McMaster University, Ross

Hume Hall, puts it this way: " Higginson did not believe in a single cause,

but rather that a constellation of interacting factors leads to the

disease. 'Cancer is preventable.if we identify and are able and willing to

deal with these factors', he said. "

 

'Able and willing' is the key phrase here. Ever since Higginson wrote his

treatise in the 1950s - it was officially endorsed by the World Health

Organization in 1964 - neither our cancer agencies nor governments have

been 'willing and able' to look at the whole constellation of interacting

factors, then act decisively for cancer prevention. (Read the excellent

book, Cancer Wars: How politics shapes what we know and don't know about

cancer, by medical historian Robert N. Proctor, for some eye-opening

revelations about many of the factors that have kept us from getting all

the facts.) There was a sense of real promise back in the late 1960s and

early 70s when the US Environmental Protection Agency and Environment

Canada first got rolling on toxics issues. But the Forces of Darkness - as

one environmental lawyer in Oregon likes to call the big polluters with big

money at stake - have generally prevailed, and they continue to contaminate

us all.

 

Instead of a real commitment to prevention, with real targets for cancer

reduction (and the funds to achieve them), we get simple pie charts

dividing cancer risks into neat slices - 10% for alcohol, 30% for diet, 5%

for sunlight, etc. Coupled with these are simplistic hints on how to live

healthier lives, focusing almost exclusively on the so-called 'lifestyle'

factors - the things we do to ourselves that leave us more vulnerable to

cancer. The carcinogens from everywhere else - in our air, water, food,

workplaces, homes and the rest of the environment-at-large rarely add up to

more than 15 per cent. And rarely do we hear anything at all about how to

reduce or eliminate these risks, even though there are plenty of healthier

alternatives at hand.

 

As Higginson tried to say back in the 50s, we don't live simple pie chart

lives. Pie slices don't even begin to reflect the 'constellation of

interacting factors' we cope with on a daily basis. The truth is that we

live in such a toxic hodge-podge that it overwhelms sciences such as

epidemiology - so much so that researchers can rarely find uncontaminated

control groups to compare to their exposed cohort, and still get a

meaningful result.

 

Besides, these simplistic summaries distract us from a truly shocking fact

- that less than one half of one per cent of total cancer budgets is

earmarked for prevention. For every billion spent fighting the 'war on

cancer' here in Ontario (research for the elusive cure, treating patients),

only about $5,000,000 is earmarked by Cancer Care Ontario to stopping

cancer before it starts. Ross Hume Hall says we'd be way farther ahead if

for every dollar spent on research and treatment, there would be a dollar

for prevention. Something like the state of Massachusetts' Toxics Use

Reduction Institute here in Canada would be a great start.

http://www.turi.org for more information.

 

Still, if it's pie charts they insist on right now, I want to add one more

'lifestyle' slice - yes, cars. Most of us have one, all of us everywhere

suffer because they're used so routinely. We're addicted. As Mark

Hertsgaard writes in his superb (but much too overlooked) 1998 book, Earth

Odyssey: Around the world in search of our environmental future, " The

automobile may well be the ultimate symbol of the modern environmental

crisis.Without the car, the suburbs and the vast amounts of economic

activity they represent would never have expanded so inexorably {like

cancer, I would add}. Exxon and OPEC would not be household names. The

Persian Gulf War, among other conflicts, would not have been fought. There

would be no such things as fast food or shopping malls. " Aside from being

the prime culprit behind global climate change - no easy feat - cars cause

a slew of horrid health effects, cancer among them.

 

As Guy Dauncey has so passionately argued, we have to wake up, and start

organizing. Cancer is preventable. We must convince powers that be we

really need a Marshall Plan for cancer prevention, and yes, let's start

with cars. For those who don't know - the Marshall Plan was an American

initiative that provided massive assistance to Europe after the Second

World War to rebuild its shattered economic infrastructure. The plan was

stunningly successful - it prevented famine and political chaos, and set

Europe back on its feet in a remarkably short time. With the Baby Boomers

marching headlong into their prime cancer years, we don't have much time,

so roll out the Marshall Plan for Cancer Prevention, with cars number one

on the list.

 

We can have pesticide-free, nutritious food, green industries, renewable

energy, healthy public transit, clean air, pure water - and yes, much less

cancer as a result.

 

Think about it. A great start would be a non-toxic Porsche Coupe with

recyclable everything that runs on a hydrogen fuel cell. Not exactly my

style, but for a lot of Cash & Cars types, it would sure be a prize worth

paying big bucks for.