Why the nations leading cancer organizations make no mention of the enviromental causes of cancer.
Published in Atlanta's Oracle2000 Magazine in June 2002
In mid 1996, Meg Kotran’s baby daughter, Lauren was diagnosed with neuroblastoma, a rare type of cancer. Meg was even more startled to learn that between 1979 and 1996 ninety-four other children had been diagnosed with cancer near New Jersey’s Toms River where they lived. She also discovered that cancer clusters were appearing across the country.
- 79 children were diagnosed with brain and central-nervous-system cancers in Rochester, New York from 1983 through 1995.
- 21 children were diagnosed with leukemia in Woburn, Massachusetts between 1969 and 1986.
- 2,638 women were diagnosed with breast cancer—in Cape Cod, Massachusetts from 1982 through 1994.
Why is the cancer business booming?All types of cancers rose 49.3% between 1950 and 1991. In 1950 an American woman faced a 1 in 20 lifetime risk of breast cancer; today that risk has more than doubled to 1 in 8. The incidence of cancer in 1982 was 90 out of 100,000 people.
In 1990 it was 112 out of 100,000. There is a 26% increase in brain cancer in children and testicular cancer in teenage boys has doubled. Bladder cancer increased by 10% between 1973 and 1991. Some experts believe that toxic chemicals play a role and that is why the nations leading cancer organizations won’t talk about the connection between pollution and cancer.
Sandra Steingraber the author of “Living Downstream” and Sharon Batt, the author of “Patient No More: The Politics of Breast Cancer” agree. Steingraber uses her own story as an example. “Cancer runs in my family,” she says. “I have an aunt who died of the same kind of bladder cancer I had, my mother had metastatic breast cancer, I have many uncles who had colon cancer.” She pauses. “But I’m adopted. So cancer runs in my family, it doesn’t run in my genes. That leads us to ask, what else do families have in common? We drink the same water, we breathe the same air, we have the same dietary habits, we often work in the same places.” She states that only 10% of cancers involve inherited mutations and that studies see more correlates with adoptive families not biological ones.
Steingraber says blaming the cause of cancer on our genetics, life style and behavior rather than the exposure to disease causing agents obscures cancer’s many environmental roots. The research to support the connection between pollution and cancer is growing: In 1996 scientists isolated the carcinogenic agent in tobacco smoke that causes cancer.In 1978, when the Israeli government banned pesticides—benzene hexachloride, DDT and lindane, breast cancer rates dropped by nearly 8% in all age groups by 1986.
Industrial countries have disproportionately more cancers than countries with little or no industry. Families exposed to a dioxin suffused cloud from a pesticide manufacturing plant in Seveso, Italy in July 1976 have three times the rates of liver cancer and increased incidence of leukemia, multiple myeloma and soft tissue sarcoma. In Finland there was an increase in non-Hodgkins lymphoma where the waterways were contaminated by chlorphenols from local sawmills. Urban lung cancer rates are two to three times higher than the surrounding countryside.
People in cities with chemical plants, pulp and paper mills and petroleum industries show elevated rates of lung cancer. People living near hazardous-waste sites have an increased risk of cancer. Women employed in the chemical and plastic industry have higher rates of breast cancer. Bladder cancer increased by 10% between 1973-1991 for workers in pharmaceutical plants and in the dye industry. Workers in the dry cleaning business have two times the rate of esophageal and bladder cancer.
The World Health Organization recently attributed 80% of cancer to environmental influence.Eighty thousand chemicals have been registered with the Environmental Protection Agency in the last 60 years. Twenty new chemicals enter the market a week. Few are properly tested. In 2000 The Center for Disease Control measured 27 industrial chemicals in most Americans and admits that there is very little data to prove that the majority of the chemicals are safe—especially with children. Chemical companies are placing hundreds of new synthetic chemicals in the market each year—far faster than toxicologists and regulatory agencies can test them.Yet the leading cancer organization makes no mention of environmental causes of cancer. Why? The answer is simple—money. Industrial chemicals have become a major sector of the global economy; any evidence linking them to serious human and ecological health problems is met with opposition.
Few people know that the primary sponsor of October Breast Cancer Awareness Month is AstraZeneca, the manufacturers of the cancer drug tamoxifen as well as fungicides and herbicides, including the carcinogen acetochlor. “This is a conflict unparalleled in the history of American medicine,” says Dr. Samuel Epstein, a professor of occupational and environmental medicine at the University of Illinois School of Public Health. “You’ve got a company that’s a spinoff of one of the world’s biggest manufacturers of carcinogenic chemicals. They’ve got control of breast cancer treatment, they’ve got control of the chemoprevention (studies), and now they have control of cancer treatment in eleven centers—which are clearly going to be prescribing the drugs they manufacture.”
According to an article in the September/October 1999 Sierra magazine, “Even the nation’s leading cancer organizations are not immune from corporate influence. The American Cancer Society (ACS) has the vice president of a major herbicide manufacturer sitting on its board of directors. High-ranking officials in the National Cancer institute routinely accept lucrative posts in the cancer-drug industry. Such tangled financial interests explain why the cancer establishment—the medical institutions, corporations, and agencies that control cancer research, treatment and education—continues to ignore mounting evidence that many cases are avoidable.”
Many of the corporate polluters now stand to profit from the cancer field. Corporate polluters make donations to the cancer societies to encourage a social and political environment conducive to their survival and prosperity. Although heart and circulatory diseases are a far greater cause of death than cancer they receive less donations or research. In 1978 the ACS became the world’s largest cancer charity and receives funds from large corporate polluters to create more cancer awareness—a proven fund-raising device. One thing ties all these things together, Epstein says: “Corporate recklessness.” The alliance between the ACS and the chemical industry, says Epstein, amounts to a “frank hostility” to prevention. There is no contradiction between preventing cancer and developing better treatment. Industry’s efforts to stifle evidence of environmental links to breast cancer has even infiltrated the medical journals. In 1995 When the New Jersey health department analyzed the pediatric rates for New Jersey’s Toms River area in 1995 they found the number of brain cancer and cancer of the central nervous system among kids under the age of five was more than seven times higher than expected. Researchers began testing the private and public wells in the area and found that in 1971 an independent waste hauler for Union Carbide Corporation disposed of waste described as a possible “flammable, corrosive and/or of a poisonous nature” to a Municipal Landfill near the Toms River. He also deposited 4,500 drums of toxic liquid at a former chicken farm one mile north of a Toms field drinking water wellfield. It’s impossible to live safely in a toxic world. We need to get political. We have to clean up the toxins in our environment to clean up the toxins in ourselves. No human should have to suffer and die to prove that industrial chemicals cause cancer.
Niki Collins-Queen is the author of “Earth, the Forgotten Temple: A Spirit Quest in the Wilderness.”
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