A Cancer in the System

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A Cancer in the System

 

 

2002-03-25 | Why are the British government and the big charities ignoring the

environmental causes of cancer?

 

There is no notion so flawed that society will not, at some time, adopt it as a

universal truth. Few misconceptions are as widespread as the idea that the war

against cancer is being won. It's hardly surprising, for scarcely a week goes by

without a promise that deliverance is just around the corner.

 

Yesterday, for example, we learnt that a new injection might cure lymphomas. The

day before, the government announced that a further 90 million pounds would help

to eliminate intestinal tumours. Cancer, most commentators agree, is all but

dead.

 

So it's perplexing to discover that cancer in industrialised countries is not

falling, but rising. While lung, cervical, uterine and stomach cancers are

declining, and treatments for testicular cancer and childhood leukaemia have

greatly improved, cancer overall has increased by 60% per cent in the last 50

years. Breast cancer has almost doubled. Prostate cancer has risen by 200%,

testicular cancer in young men by 300%. In the US, childhood brain cancers and

leukaemias have been advancing by 1.8% a year since 1973. In Britain, forty per

cent of us are likely to contract cancer at some stage in our lives.

 

These increases are often ascribed to better detection and an ageing population.

But the figures are age-adjusted: a 60 year-old today is 200 per cent more

likely to contract prostate cancer than a 60 year-old would have been in 1950.

Reported cancers have continued to rise after the universal deployment of new

screening techniques: this is not an artefact of diagnosis. Cancer is thriving.

 

The reason, according to the professor of environmental medicine Samuel Epstein,

is obvious. Since 1940, the world's production of synthetic organic chemicals

has risen 600-fold, exposing our bodies to a massive toxic load. There is plenty

of evidence to support his contention.

 

Last year, for example, a US study found that children living beside busy roads

were six times as likely to suffer from cancer as children living in quiet

areas. This is hardly surprising: the two most carcinogenic compounds ever

detected are both produced by diesel engines. An English study published in 1997

showed that children living within five kilometres of oil refineries and

chemical plants were more likely to contract cancer than those living further

away.

 

Figures released by the US Environmental Protection Agency last year suggest

that as many as 7 per cent of all cancers are caused by dioxins, mostly from

incinerators. A Danish study published in 1999 showed that women whose bodies

contain high concentrations of the pesticide dieldrin are twice as likely to

develop cancer. Other scientific papers have highlighted the dangers of

herbicides, beef hormones, petrol additives, oral contraceptives, artificial

sweeteners, PVC and scores of other chemicals.

 

So I commend to you a fascinating document, published by the Department of

Health, called the NHS Cancer Plan, which tells us how the government intends to

eliminate cancer in England. It contains plenty of helpful advice on giving up

smoking. It outlines a scheme for increasing the amount of fruit and vegetables

children eat. But only one pollutant is mentioned as a possible cause of cancer:

radon gas, which happens to be naturally occurring.

 

It's not hard to see that both the major polluting industries and the

pharmaceutical companies manufacturing cancer " cures " (they are often one and

the same) have a certain interest in sustaining the status quo. But it strikes

me that these might not be the only lobbyists the government is listening to.

 

The big cancer charities also appear reluctant to take contamination seriously.

The Imperial Cancer Research Fund's website records no matches for the word

" pollution " . The researcher Martin Walker reports that of the 110 research units

cited in its 1998 scientific report, not one deals with chemical or

environmental carcinogens.

 

Last year the Cancer Research Campaign predicted that cancer would be cured by

2050, as a result of new genetic technologies. Its website mentions pollution,

but dismisses concerns with the claim that " experts think that only 5% of

preventable cancer deaths may be linked to environmental factors " . The CRC's

ten-page press release on poverty and cancer blames inequalities in treatment

for differing rates of death, but says nothing about pollution, even though the

poor are far more likely to live beside dirty factories and toxic dumps than the

rich.

 

Give them more money, the cancer charities claim, and they will find the magic

formula which will save us all from a hideous death. But could it be possible

that we are dying so that they might live?

 

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 4th January 2001. Reprinted by

permission of the author.