Rachel's #932: OFF TARGET IN THE WAR ON CANCER

[Guest guest]

OFF TARGET IN THE WAR ON

CANCER

 

By Devra Davis

 

[Devra Davis's most recent book is

The

Secret History of the War on

Cancer.]

 

We've been fighting the war on cancer for almost four decades now,

since President Richard M. Nixon officially launched it in 1971. It's

time to admit that our efforts have often targeted the wrong enemies

and used the wrong weapons.

 

Throughout the industrial world, the war on cancer remains focused on

commercially fueled efforts to develop drugs and technologies that can

find and treat the disease -- to the tune of more than $100 billion a

year in the United States alone. Meanwhile, the struggle basically

ignores most of the things known to cause cancer, such as tobacco,

radiation, sunlight, benzene, asbestos, solvents, and some drugs and

hormones. Even now, modern cancer-causing agents such as gasoline

exhaust, pesticides and other air pollutants are simply deemed the

inevitable price of progress.

 

They're not. Scientists understand that most cancer is not born but

made. Although identical twins start life with amazingly similar

genetic material, as adults they do not develop the same cancers. As

with most of us, where they live and work and the habits that they

develop do more to determine their health than their genes do.

Americans in their 20s today carry around in their bodies levels of

some chemicals that can impair their ability to produce healthy

children -- and increase the chances that those children will develop

cancer.

 

Consider the icon of American cancer, the cyclist Lance Armstrong.

He's hardly alone as an inspiring younger survivor. Of the 10 million

American cancer survivors who are alive five years after their

diagnosis, about one in 10 is younger than 40. Could exposure to

radiation and obesity-promoting chemicals help explain why, according

to a study in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, the rates

of the testicular cancer that Armstrong developed nearly doubled in

most industrialized countries in the past three decades? Should we

wait to find out?

 

I'm calling for prudence and prevention, not panic. The Centers for

Disease Control and Prevention and the Environmental Working Group

have confirmed that American children are being born with dozens of

chemicals in their bodies that did not exist just two decades earlier,

including toxic flame retardants from fabrics. A new study by Barbara

Cohn and other scientists at the Public Health Institute in Berkeley,

Calif., finds that girls exposed to elevated levels of the pesticide

DDT before age 14 are five times more likely to develop breast cancer

when they reach middle age.

 

Yes, the war has had some important successes: Cancer deaths in the

United States are finally dropping, chiefly because of badly belated

(and still poorly supported) efforts to curb smoking, reductions in

the levels of some pollutants and significant advances in the control

of cancers of the breast, colon, prostate and cervix. But new cases of

cancer not linked to smoking or aging are on the rise, such as cancer

in children and non-Hodgkin lymphoma in people older than 55. And

according to the CDC, cancer is the No. 2 cause of death for children

and middle-age people, second only to accidents. The longer view is

troubling: The National Cancer Institute reports that from 1950 to

2001, the number of cancers of the bone marrow, the bladder and the

liver doubled.

 

Both public health and social justice demand that we focus more on the

things that cause cancer. For example, blacks and other minorities

still die of many forms of cancer more often than do whites. Could

this be tied to the fact that so many African Americans hold blue-

collar jobs, which may bring them into contact with carcinogens? Or

because poor blacks are more likely to live in polluted neighborhoods,

or eat diets higher in cancer-causing fats? We can't say, and we're

not even trying to find out. The vast cancer-fighting enterprise has

decidedly different priorities.

 

Even our triumphs in battling cancer can leave us with tragic

shortcomings. Consider one irony of oncology: Many of the agents that

can so effectively rout cancer early in life, such as chemotherapy and

radiation, can also increase the risks of falling prey to other forms

of the disease later on. According to a study in the Journal of the

Royal Society of Medicine, one out of every three girls treated with

radiation before age 16 to arrest Hodgkin's disease -- a cancer of the

lymphatic system that often occurs in young people -- will develop

breast cancer by age 40. Of course, many cancers in children and young

adults might have been avoided in the first place without earlier

exposure to cancer-causing agents.

 

We also need to weigh the downsides of the way we use radiation today

to find problems in the healthy public, especially the young. A

consensus statement from the American College of Radiology notes that

" the current annual collective dose estimate from medical exposure

in

the United States has been calculated as roughly equivalent to the

total worldwide collective dose generated by the nuclear catastrophe

at Chernobyl. "

 

Most parents (and many emergency-medicine physicians) don't know that

a single CT scan of a child's head can deliver the same radioactive

dose as that in 200 to 6,000 chest X-rays. Some pediatric experts

recommend that CT scans of children be restricted to medical

emergencies and kept at doses as low as reasonably possible. Even so,

according to the American College of Radiology, the use of CT scans

has jumped tenfold in the past decade -- a change that stems from the

profitability and growth of " defensive medicine, " and one that

has not

resulted in any improvement in our overall health that I can discern.

 

The Food and Drug Administration, the Consumer Product Safety

Commission and the Environmental Protection Agency often lack the

authority and resources to monitor and control tobacco smoke,

asbestos, tanning salons and the cancer-causing agents in food, water

and the everyday products we use on our bodies and in our homes. Under

antiquated laws, chemical and radiation hazards are examined one at a

time, if at all. Of the nearly 80,000 chemicals regularly bought and

sold today, according to the National Academy of Sciences, fewer than

10 percent have been tested for their capacity to cause cancer or do

other damage.

 

As a result of these policy failures, the United States often stands

alone -- and not in a good way. Unlike Italy, Ireland, France,

Albania, Argentina, Uruguay and many other countries, the United

States has failed to ban smoking in public spaces nationwide. Unlike

European children, American kids are exposed to small levels of known

carcinogens in their food, air, shampoos, bubble baths and skin creams

-- such as the clear, colorless liquid known as " 1, 4-dioxane, "

a

common contaminant that causes cancer in animals and has been banned

from cosmetics by the European Union.

 

In fact, our growing dependence on many unstudied modern conveniences

makes us the subjects of vast, uncontrolled experiments to which none

of us ever consents. Consider cellphones, whose long-term health

consequences could prove disastrous. Experimental findings show that

cellphone radiation damages living cells and can penetrate the skull.

Widely publicized research on cellphone use in the early 1990s

indicates that the phones are safe, but those studies did not include

any children and excluded all business users. While exposure levels

are much lower on newer phones, the effects of gadgets that have

increasingly become part of our children's lives remain unstudied.

 

That's unwise. Recent reports from Sweden and France, published in the

journal Occupational and Environmental Medicine, reveal that adults

who have used cellphones for 10 years or more have twice as much brain

cancer on the side of their heads most frequently exposed to the

phone. The Swiss and Chinese governments have set official exposure

limits for cellphone microwave emissions that are 500 times lower than

those the United States mandates. In Bangalore, India, it is illegal

to sell a cellphone to a child younger than 16. As a basic precaution,

people should use the phones with earpieces or speakers, and young

children should not use them at all -- consistent with warnings

recently issued by the German and British governments. Because brain

cancer can take 10 years or longer to develop, national statistics

cannot be expected to show the health impact of today's skyrocketing

cellphone use. But we shouldn't wait for the cases to roll in before

acting.

 

True, there are many uncertainties about environmental cancer hazards.

But these doubts should not be confused with proof that environmental

factors are harmless. The confusion arises for three different

reasons. First, studying the ways that our surroundings affect our

cancers is genuinely hard. Second, public and private funding levels

for research and control of environmental cancer are scandalously low.

Finally, those who profit from the continued use of some risky

technologies have devised well-financed efforts to sow doubt about

many modern hazards, taking their cue from the machinations of the

tobacco industry. The best crafted public relations campaigns

masquerade as independent scientific information from unimpeachable

authorities.

 

No matter how much our efforts to treat cancer may advance, the best

way to reduce cancer's toll is to keep people from getting it. We need

to join the rest of the industrialized world by issuing a national ban

on asbestos and forbidding smoking in the workplace and other public

spaces. We must reduce the hazards faced by those working to build our

homes, transport our goods and make the products we consume. We should

restrict CT scans of children to medical emergencies, limit the use of

diagnostic radiation in general, ban young children from using

cellphones and keep the rest of us from using tanning beds. And we

must recognize that pollutants do not need passports. Controlling

cancer, like controlling global warming, can take place only on an

international scale. We can -- and must -- do better.

 

n tAt 01:47 PM 11/10/07, you wrote:

OFF TARGET IN THE WAR ON

CANCER

By Devra Davis

[Devra Davis's most recent book is The Secret History of the War on

Cancer.]

We've been fighting the war on cancer for almost four decades now,

since President Richard M. Nixon officially launched it in 1971.

It's

time to admit that our efforts have often targeted the wrong enemies

and used the wrong weapons.

Throughout the industrial world, the war on cancer remains focused

on

commercially fueled efforts to develop drugs and technologies that

can

find and treat the disease -- to the tune of more than $100 billion

a

year in the United States alone. Meanwhile, the struggle basically

ignores most of the things known to cause cancer, such as tobacco,

radiation, sunlight, benzene, asbestos, solvents, and some drugs and

hormones. Even now, modern cancer-causing agents such as gasoline

exhaust, pesticides and other air pollutants are simply deemed the

inevitable price of progress.

They're not. Scientists understand that most cancer is not born but

made. Although identical twins start life with amazingly similar

genetic material, as adults they do not develop the same cancers. As

with most of us, where they live and work and the habits that they

develop do more to determine their health than their genes do.

Americans in their 20s today carry around in their bodies levels of

some chemicals that can impair their ability to produce healthy

children -- and increase the chances that those children will

develop

cancer.

Consider the icon of American cancer, the cyclist Lance Armstrong.

He's hardly alone as an inspiring younger survivor. Of the 10

million

American cancer survivors who are alive five years after their

diagnosis, about one in 10 is younger than 40. Could exposure to

radiation and obesity-promoting chemicals help explain why,

according

to a study in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, the

rates

of the testicular cancer that Armstrong developed nearly doubled in

most industrialized countries in the past three decades? Should we

wait to find out?

I'm calling for prudence and prevention, not panic. The Centers for

Disease Control and Prevention and the Environmental Working Group

have confirmed that American children are being born with dozens of

chemicals in their bodies that did not exist just two decades

earlier,

including toxic flame retardants from fabrics. A new study by

Barbara

Cohn and other scientists at the Public Health Institute in

Berkeley,

Calif., finds that girls exposed to elevated levels of the pesticide

DDT before age 14 are five times more likely to develop breast

cancer

when they reach middle age.

Yes, the war has had some important successes: Cancer deaths in the

United States are finally dropping, chiefly because of badly belated

(and still poorly supported) efforts to curb smoking, reductions in

the levels of some pollutants and significant advances in the

control

of cancers of the breast, colon, prostate and cervix. But new cases

of

cancer not linked to smoking or aging are on the rise, such as

cancer

in children and non-Hodgkin lymphoma in people older than 55. And

according to the CDC, cancer is the No. 2 cause of death for

children

and middle-age people, second only to accidents. The longer view is

troubling: The National Cancer Institute reports that from 1950 to

2001, the number of cancers of the bone marrow, the bladder and the

liver doubled.

Both public health and social justice demand that we focus more on

the

things that cause cancer. For example, blacks and other minorities

still die of many forms of cancer more often than do whites. Could

this be tied to the fact that so many African Americans hold blue-

collar jobs, which may bring them into contact with carcinogens? Or

because poor blacks are more likely to live in polluted

neighborhoods,

or eat diets higher in cancer-causing fats? We can't say, and we're

not even trying to find out. The vast cancer-fighting enterprise has

decidedly different priorities.

Even our triumphs in battling cancer can leave us with tragic

shortcomings. Consider one irony of oncology: Many of the agents

that

can so effectively rout cancer early in life, such as chemotherapy

and

radiation, can also increase the risks of falling prey to other

forms

of the disease later on. According to a study in the Journal of the

Royal Society of Medicine, one out of every three girls treated with

radiation before age 16 to arrest Hodgkin's disease -- a cancer of

the

lymphatic system that often occurs in young people -- will develop

breast cancer by age 40. Of course, many cancers in children and

young

adults might have been avoided in the first place without earlier

exposure to cancer-causing agents.

We also need to weigh the downsides of the way we use radiation

today

to find problems in the healthy public, especially the young. A

consensus statement from the American College of Radiology notes

that

" the current annual collective dose estimate from medical exposure

in

the United States has been calculated as roughly equivalent to the

total worldwide collective dose generated by the nuclear catastrophe

at Chernobyl. "

Most parents (and many emergency-medicine physicians) don't know

that

a single CT scan of a child's head can deliver the same radioactive

dose as that in 200 to 6,000 chest X-rays. Some pediatric experts

recommend that CT scans of children be restricted to medical

emergencies and kept at doses as low as reasonably possible. Even

so,

according to the American College of Radiology, the use of CT scans

has jumped tenfold in the past decade -- a change that stems from

the

profitability and growth of " defensive medicine, " and one that

has not

resulted in any improvement in our overall health that I can

discern.

The Food and Drug Administration, the Consumer Product Safety

Commission and the Environmental Protection Agency often lack the

authority and resources to monitor and control tobacco smoke,

asbestos, tanning salons and the cancer-causing agents in food,

water

and the everyday products we use on our bodies and in our homes.

Under

antiquated laws, chemical and radiation hazards are examined one at

a

time, if at all. Of the nearly 80,000 chemicals regularly bought and

sold today, according to the National Academy of Sciences, fewer

than

10 percent have been tested for their capacity to cause cancer or do

other damage.

As a result of these policy failures, the United States often stands

alone -- and not in a good way. Unlike Italy, Ireland, France,

Albania, Argentina, Uruguay and many other countries, the United

States has failed to ban smoking in public spaces nationwide. Unlike

European children, American kids are exposed to small levels of

known

carcinogens in their food, air, shampoos, bubble baths and skin

creams

-- such as the clear, colorless liquid known as " 1, 4-dioxane, "

a

common contaminant that causes cancer in animals and has been banned

from cosmetics by the European Union.

In fact, our growing dependence on many unstudied modern

conveniences

makes us the subjects of vast, uncontrolled experiments to which

none

of us ever consents. Consider cellphones, whose long-term health

consequences could prove disastrous. Experimental findings show that

cellphone radiation damages living cells and can penetrate the

skull.

Widely publicized research on cellphone use in the early 1990s

indicates that the phones are safe, but those studies did not

include

any children and excluded all business users. While exposure levels

are much lower on newer phones, the effects of gadgets that have

increasingly become part of our children's lives remain

unstudied.

That's unwise. Recent reports from Sweden and France, published in

the

journal Occupational and Environmental Medicine, reveal that adults

who have used cellphones for 10 years or more have twice as much

brain

cancer on the side of their heads most frequently exposed to the

phone. The Swiss and Chinese governments have set official exposure

limits for cellphone microwave emissions that are 500 times lower

than

those the United States mandates. In Bangalore, India, it is illegal

to sell a cellphone to a child younger than 16. As a basic

precaution,

people should use the phones with earpieces or speakers, and young

children should not use them at all -- consistent with warnings

recently issued by the German and British governments. Because brain

cancer can take 10 years or longer to develop, national statistics

cannot be expected to show the health impact of today's skyrocketing

cellphone use. But we shouldn't wait for the cases to roll in before

acting.

True, there are many uncertainties about environmental cancer

hazards.

But these doubts should not be confused with proof that

environmental

factors are harmless. The confusion arises for three different

reasons. First, studying the ways that our surroundings affect our

cancers is genuinely hard. Second, public and private funding levels

for research and control of environmental cancer are scandalously

low.

Finally, those who profit from the continued use of some risky

technologies have devised well-financed efforts to sow doubt about

many modern hazards, taking their cue from the machinations of the

tobacco industry. The best crafted public relations campaigns

masquerade as independent scientific information from unimpeachable

authorities.

No matter how much our efforts to treat cancer may advance, the best

way to reduce cancer's toll is to keep people from getting it. We

need

to join the rest of the industrialized world by issuing a national

ban

on asbestos and forbidding smoking in the workplace and other public

spaces. We must reduce the hazards faced by those working to build

our

homes, transport our goods and make the products we consume. We

should

restrict CT scans of children to medical emergencies, limit the use

of

diagnostic radiation in general, ban young children from using

cellphones and keep the rest of us from using tanning beds. And we

must recognize that pollutants do not need passports. Controlling

cancer, like controlling global warming, can take place only on an

international scale. We can -- and must -- do better.

 

 

******

Kraig and Shirley Carroll ... in the woods of SE Kentucky

http://www.thehavens.com/

thehavens

606-376-3363

 

 

 

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