[DEBATE] : (Fwd) Cancerous medical capitalism

[Patrick Bond]

 Globe and Mail                   November 17, 2007
 

Cancer research: misspent money, wasted efforts and unconscionable profits

 
Malignancies

 
The secret history of the war on cancer

By Devra Davis

Basic Books, 505 pages, $33.50

 

Reviewed by Andrew Nikiforuk

 

In 1936, the world's cancer experts assembled in Brussels to talk shop. 
The gathering heard a lot about workshop hazards and environmental 
toxins. A British scientist, who had studied identical twins, argued 
that cancer wasn't inherited, but mostly the product of early chemical 
exposures in life. A meticulous Argentine showed how sunlight combined 
with hydrocarbons could sprout tumours on rats. Others explained how 
regular exposure to the hormone estrogen prompted male rodents to grow 
unseemly breasts. Everyone agreed that arsenic and benzene were 
workplace killers, too.

 

Since then, the cancer establishment has retreated from the truth faster 
than Canada's commitment to a greener country. What began as sincere 
investigation into the economic root causes of a complex set of 200 
different diseases, at the turn of the 20th century, quickly degenerated 
into a single-minded focus on treatments after the Second World War, 
argues Devra Davis, one of North America's sharpest epidemiologists (her 
previous book, When Smoke Ran Like Water, was a finalist for the 
National Book Award).

 

In the process, industry and its propaganda hit men have used every 
opportunity to discredit, dismiss or disparage information on cancer 
hazards in the workplace or at home. So let me warn comfortable readers 
here and now. This courageous and altogether horrible book is about as 
unsettling as it can get. It painstakingly documents such a persistently 
foul pattern of deceit and denial that I often wanted to throw it 
against a wall and scream.

 

Furthermore, Davis's hair-raising investigation - in what is easily the 
most important science book of the year - will rob you of any lingering, 
Disney-like fantasies you might have entertained about the nobility of 
cancer fundraising campaigns. And if you have lost a relative or friend 
to a malignant tumour (odds are you have), Davis will make you weep 
again, knowing that fraud and outright criminal neglect have turned a 
40-year-long medical war into a questionable $70-billion charade.

 

Even Davis can't hide her own disbelief at times: "Astonishing alliances 
between naive or far too clever academics and folks with major economic 
interests in selling potentially cancerous materials have kept us from 
figuring out whether or not many modern products affect our chances of 
developing cancer." She then diligently documents, for example, how some 
of the world's most prominent cancer researchers, such as the late Sir 
Richard Doll, the epidemiologist who was instrumental in linking smoking 
to health problems, secretly worked for chemical firms without 
disclosing these ties when publishing studies.

 

Davis, a modern scientist committed to moral clarity, knows her stuff 
and then some. After decades of front-line battles against air 
polluters, she now heads the world's first Centre on Environmental 
Oncology at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute. She too has 
smelled and felt cancer firsthand, having lost two parents and many 
friends, including the comic Andrea Martin, to the disease. She shines, 
in short, with a burning indignation about the abuse of power in medicine.

 

Her angry history of the way free and open discourse on cancers in the 
workplace has become as elusive as meaningful political debates reveals 
the rot with the bluntness of a chemo treatment. When men who bottled 
liquid lead as a gasoline additive in the 1920s started to drop like 
flies, General Motors blamed the workers and called lead a "natural 
contaminant." When dye-makers at DuPont got bladder cancer from working 
with benzidine in the 1930s, the company, like an errant spouse, first 
denied the findings. Then they refused to record cases. Finally, they 
suppressed or delayed publishing the results.

 

After inhaling tar and poisonous fumes from coke ovens, black steel 
workers succumbed to waves of lung cancer in the 1950s. Yet industry 
argued that blacks were just more vulnerable to lung-consuming tumours. 
It took an enterprising study of dying Mormon coke-oven workers to 
challenge the lie. Damning studies on the health of asbestos workers 
couldn't find a home in the 1930s, and to this day, Canada shamefully 
remains an exporter of the lung destroyer.

 

Benzene, a true-blue leukemia-maker that can cause workers to bleed out, 
has been the subject of 100 years of deceit and denial. When Myron 
Mehlman, a toxicologist with Mobil Oil, told Japanese officials in 1989 
that gasoline with 5-per-cent benzene was damned dangerous and shouldn't 
be sold, the company fired him. Davis reports that ExxonMobil, 
ConocoPhillips and Shell have invested $27-million in China to 
"contradict earlier claims that link exposure to low- and mid-levels of 
benzene to cancers and other diseases."

 

In 1986, researcher William Fayerweather put together a computerized 
system for tracking the health of every worker at DuPont's chemical 
plants. Davis found that "neither he nor his system any longer work for 
DuPont." She reports that men and women who produced computer chips for 
IBM are now dying young from cancers of the breast, bone marrow and kidney.

 

While China now leads a global economic boom, it's also exploring new 
opportunities for cancer. Even its secretive, Ottawa-like government now 
concedes that the country's industries use the nation's rivers as 
industrial urinals. Not surprisingly, China now lists cancer as its 
number-one killer.

 

Many of Davis's findings simply stunned me. Consider the invasion of 
computerized imaging technology (CT scans) in modern medicine. Since its 
invention in the 1970s, CT scanning has become a $100-billion industry 
that creates nifty three-dimensional images, yet exposes patients to 
radiation. CT scans have become such a favoured technology that one in 
every three scans recommended for children is probably unnecessary.

 

In the last 25 years, the amount of radiation zapping North Americans 
from scanning and the like has increased fivefold. Now ponder this 
stunner: "Modern America's annual exposure to radiation from diagnostic 
machines is equal to that released by a nuclear accident that spewed the 
equivalent of hundreds of Hiroshimas across much of Russia and Eastern 
Europe." Most physicians don't know that a typical CT scan equals 400 
chest X-rays. A group of researchers at Yale now estimate that radiation 
from CT scans of the head and abdomen will kill 2,500 people a year.

 

Davis also presents some disturbing data on aspartame, cellphones and 
Ritalin. Armed with what a prominent toxicologist would later describe 
as "uninterpretable and worthless" studies on aspartame, Donald 
Rumsfeld, then CEO of Searle & Co. (since acquired by Monsanto), used 
his formidable political contacts to gain government approval for the 
food additive in 1981. Yet the U.S. Air Force still reports that 
aspartame "can cause serious brain problems in pilots." Despite whatever 
malarkey you might have read, cellphone users still have double the risk 
of brain cancer and folks under 18 years of age really shouldn't be 
using them. Ritalin, the drug to slow kids down, can rearrange an 
individual's chromosomes, yet in some school districts more than 10 per 
cent of the students are now on the drug. As Davis notes, "Highly 
profitable industries have no incentive to a! sk whether the products on 
which they depend may have adverse consequences."

 

Each and every chapter in this book offers a uncomfortable revelation. 
Pioneering research on the deadly effects of tobacco and environmental 
hormones by the Nazis secretly found its way to many of U.S. 
corporations producing the same questionable goods. The American Cancer 
Society spends less than 10 per cent of its billion-dollar budget on 
independent studies. The great Wilhelm Hueper, the bold pathologist who 
wrote the book on "occupational tumours," suffered one indignity after 
another for simply reporting the dangers of uranium mining. And on it goes.

 

So, the strange reality of cancer fighting truly reads like one of 
Kafka's nightmares. Most of the 100,000 chemicals commonly used in 
commerce have not been tested. Their proliferation in the workplace has 
created a cancer epidemic and a medical-business industry to treat it. 
Given the toxic nature of many cancer treatments, including radiation 
and chemotherapy, Davis claims that cancer researchers and cancer 
physicians are dying in record numbers.

 

Davis not only sheds light on this darkness, she also opens many hopeful 
doors. She celebrates tough, rural, blue-collar mothers who have taken 
on the companies that have riddled their children with cancer-makers. 
And she welcomes groups such as Health Care Without Harm, a novel 
coalition focused on getting toxic products out of hospitals.

 

But her remarkable and disturbing history ultimately illuminates another 
hidden hydrocarbon holocaust. Our frightful addiction to fossil fuels 
has not only fouled the atmosphere but given us a wealth of chemicals, 
plastics and technologies that increasingly undoes the health of 
millions with cancers. It, too, has given us rich armies of PR men 
employing "the same expert public relations strategies that kept us tied 
in knots on tobacco."

 

Davis knows that changing medical perspectives and priorities, from 
treatment to prevention, will be an enormous task. But she does not 
despair. In fact she ends her book with a simple Talmudic story. Faced 
with a complicated assignment, a group of workers rhyme off the usual 
excuses: They haven't got the tools or they haven't got the energy. But 
a good rabbi (sounding much like Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings) sets 
them straight: "It is not for you to complete the task," he says. "But 
you must begin."

 

Davis's masterful book has shown us why we must begin rethinking cancer 
research and treatment now for our children's sake.

 
Contributing reviewer Andrew Nikiforuk has written extensively about the 
cancerous legacy of uranium and oil sands mining in northern Canada. He 
is the author of Pandemonium, about how global trade and climate change 
threaten food security.