Summer 1996 - Issue Number 36
. . . our fight will have to be a global one, too.
I cannot even imagine yet what that fight would look like.
In our culture, cancer is regarded as more than just a disease. It doesn't only make people sick before it kills them, but it mysteriously consumes and mutilates its victims before they die, so that cancer has the unique distinction of being a common cultural metaphor for evil. The diagnosis of cancer is a staggering blow to the patient who hears it, not just because it carries the sentence of pain and death, but also because it taints the bearer with the aura of its metaphor.(1) If you've got cancer, you did something wrong. Such a cultural icon has served the powerful cancer establishment(2) well, and even today many cancer patients maintain a lonely and shamed silence about their disease, while cancer runs up an annual tab in the billions of dollars. But the phenomenal rise during the last several decades in cancer statistics has given birth to a new movement of cancer activists, led by women, whose battle takes on not only the cancer establishment, but also the culturally entrenched view that cancer is an individual tragedy. We are beginning to understand that cancer can no longer be considered simply a medical problem, but rather we are recognizing that the cancer epidemic is a political issue of global proportions.
Numbers tell much of the story all by themselves. At the turn of this century, cancer accounted for approximately 5% of the deaths in the United States. In 1962, when Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, a book credited with bringing forth the modern environmental movement, cancer would strike one out of every four Americans. When I was diagnosed with cancer sixteen years ago, that figure had moved up to one out of every three Americans. According to the President's National Cancer Advisory Board in 1994, cancer will very soon overtake heart disease in the United States to become the leading cause of death.(3) That prediction is already being realized, for as of today cancer will strike nearly 45% of men and 39% of women.(4) Roughly 90 million Americans alive today will hear those words: "It's cancer." In not too many more years, fully half the population of this country will face the diagnosis of cancer sometime during their lives. All this in one century, and all this from a disease that we cannot catch from each other.
The cancer establishment puts forth several shopworn explanations for the statistical explosion. We are living longer, the argument goes, and that accounts for it (despite the fact that even their own statistics are age-adjusted). Or, we have better diagnostic techniques, so we simply find more of it(5). If you're not convinced by those arguments that everything is really under control, then you are treated to rosy assurances that great strides have been made in cancer treatment, despite the mortality statistics which pretty clearly indicate that the only treatments offered by the medical profession: surgery, chemotherapy, and/or radiation (which we in the cancer movement call "slash, poison, and burn"), have not been able to stem the tide of cancer deaths. Nearly 1,500 people die from cancer every day in the United States.(6)
More than 30 years ago the World Health Organization (WHO) concluded that 80% of cancers in industrialized countries like the United States were caused by human-produced environmental pollution. The WHO came up with this figure by comparing the rate of cancer in non-industrialized nations (making the unfounded assumption that all cancers in such areas of the world were caused by natural carcinogens), to the rate of cancers in industrialized nations, and the difference gave them the 80% figure. But we now know, for instance, that PCBs have been found in the adipose tissues of polar bears in the arctic, giving us a much a better understanding than the WHO had in 1964 of the ability of chemical and radioactive carcinogenic substances to travel around the globe. In light of this new knowledge, and bearing in mind the increased amounts of carcinogenic substances released into the environment in the last 30 years, the 1964 figure of 80% appears ridiculously low, because we can now assume that the rate of cancers in non-industrialized countries, used as a base figure by the WHO, was in part due to carcinogens which had traveled to those countries from their more industrialized neighbors. Thus it is safe--even conservative--to say that at least 90% of cancers that we see in the United States today are related, directly or indirectly, to industrial and agricultural environmental contaminants. In other words, 90% of the suffering and death from cancer might never have happened if our environmental/social policy in this country had been one which placed the health of the population as a higher priority than corporate profits.
Corporate profits are very much the issue. It is cheaper for business and agriculture in the United States to pollute rather than protect people and other life from poisonous substances. In fact, for industry in the U.S., the cancer epidemic is a win-win situation. The polluting industries, who are of course the most powerful and vehement opponents of any environmental controls, complain that existing environmental regulations in the U.S. cost them $125 billion annually,(7 and they are willing to spend unlimited amounts of money in a continuing campaign to weaken existing regulations and forestall any further limitations on their polluting practices. Many of those same industries, which are major polluters (and thus major contributors to the increase of cancer), also market products directly related to the detection and/or treatment of cancer. For instance, Zeneca Pharmaceuticals, the sole manufacturer of tamoxifen, which is a drug used for metastatic breast cancer and now the subject of a $68-million dollar clinical trial for cancer "prevention" by the National Cancer Institute, has a plant in Richmond, California which, according to the Sierra Club(8), pollutes with 700 pounds a year of toxic air emissions, including toluene and perchloroethylene, both linked to cancer. Rhone-Poulenc Rorer, a French pharmaceutical which generously underwrites one of the grassroots cancer organizations,(9 ensuring that the organization will only echo the position of the cancer establishment institutions, also has a pesticide plant in West Virginia nearly identical to the Union Carbide facility which killed thousands in Bhopal, India. Chevron Corporation, one of the largest polluters in the San Francisco Bay Area (10) with annual toxic emissions in the neighborhood of 19 million pounds, has just begun offering its card-holders cancer insurance! DuPont is one of the largest producers of film for mammograms and was cited by the EPA in 1989 for leaking butadiene into the groundwater at one of its mammogram-film plants in Louisiana; butadiene has been linked to breast cancer.(11)The nuclear industry is another clear case in point. Ionizing radiation has been recognized ever since the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima as a powerful carcinogen. For instance, it was cautiously estimated that the Chernobyl accident will result in a least 250,000 more cancers in the world, (12) but that figure was suggested when official accounts of the disaster were at least 100 times less than what we now know the full extent to have been. Many of those same radionuclides are used in cancer treatment, even in those cancers like thyroid tumors which are most directly caused by excessive exposure to radiation. According to Dr. John Gofman, most breast cancers seen today can be linked, at least in part, to the overuse of medical x-rays. (13) But billions of dollars are invested in x-ray machines and in the machines to detect and treat cancers, and millions of women dutifully have annual mammograms.
The evidence that agribusiness and industry both promote and profit from the cancer epidemic is incontrovertible and has been recognized for decades. Placed, however, in today's political/economic world of "free trade," the situation is enormously magnified and complicated. With the passage first of NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement), followed closely by GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade), American industry and agriculture finally secured not only the means to pollute the rest of the world with impunity, but also they created the means by which they could effectively abolish domestic environmental regulations, leaving the American public no legal recourse. The Clean Air Act, for example, will most likely be abandoned soon. Passed under the Nixon administration, the Clean Air Act is one progressive piece of legislation which has been under steady and successful attack from U.S. business interests since its passage. That it has become largely ineffectual is made obvious by any visit to Los Angeles; still, the Clean Air Act is all we have. Under the terms of GATT, some European oil companies who want access to the American market for their gasoline but whose gasoline does not meet the standards required by the Clean Air Act, have sued the United States claiming that the Clean Air Act is a GATT-illegal barrier to free trade. Either the U.S. can pay huge fines or dump the Clean Air Act. Which do you think it will be? Lung cancer is still the biggest cancer of all in the U.S. Certainly smoking plays an important role in those lung cancer death tolls, but also there has been a "big and frightening" increase in lung cancer among non-smokers. (14) That increase will surely continue to rise.
It's not only our lungs. Pesticides are so ubiquitous in the tissue of Americans, that anyone reading these words at this moment probably has in her or his fatty tissue at least 500 different alien substances (15). The milk fed to infants from the breasts of American women is now so contaminated with toxic substances, that if it were bottled and sold on grocery store shelves, the Food and Drug Administration would be forced to recall it as unfit for human consumption. (16) Under the terms of GATT, US agribusiness can increase the amounts of pesticides used on crops like apples and broccoli--common items in the American diet--by as much as 4,000%! (17)
The proliferation of chemical and nuclear contaminants is a relatively recent phenomenon, ushered in by World War II. When it became clear more than a decade after World War II to those who were looking that pollution had become a serious danger to all forms of life, environmentalism was born. Those early environmentalists worked hard, and thanks largely to their efforts, we got legislation like the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act. Unfortunately, many of the same organizations which worked for those pieces of legislation have by now been so tamed by industry money that they even supported the Clinton administration in the passage of NAFTA, a precursor to GATT. New coalitions to fill the voids left by bought-off mainstream environmental organizations have sprung up in the past couple of years. These alliances of environmental justice organizations and grassroots health organizations, including members of the new cancer movement, will have a much tougher battle than any health and environmental groups have ever had to face before. We must continue to confront the ingrained mythology still perpetrated by the cancer establishment that cancer is caused by individual life-styles and that the cancer victim is to blame for the disease. But more, if much of the cancer and much of the other assaults on our health are largely due to environmental pollution, and if the polluters and their government supporters now operate on an international stage, our fight will have to be a global one, too. I cannot even imagine yet what that fight would look like.
1 Not to mention the very real possibility that a diagnosis of cancer can, and often does, result in losing one's job, one's lover or spouse, and/or one's health insurance.
2 The "cancer establishment" is a term used to describe the interlocked political and financial interests of institutions which include (1) government agencies like the National Cancer Institute, (2) private cancer research institutions, like Sloan Kettering or M.D. Anderson; (3) the pharmaceutical industry, and (4) the private, so-called charitable organization, the American Cancer Society. Their unified approach to cancer has been to ignore, even deny, the environmental causation while pushing for more and more money to go for cancer "research" with the promise of finding the ever-elusive cure.
3 Subcommittee to Evaluate the National Cancer Problem, National Cancer Advisory Board: Cancer at the Crossroads: A Report to Congress for the Nation, National Cancer Institute, September, 1994
4 American Cancer Society: Cancer Facts and Figures, 1995, p. 13.
5 This argument is offered to the American public by the American Cancer Society which functions as the public mouthpiece of the cancer establishment, but the fact that the National Cancer Institute does not use this argument, when they certainly would if there were a shred of truth to it, adequately discredits it.
6 American Medical News, March 20, 1995, p. 25.
7 Dowie, Mark: Losing Ground, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1995, p. 85
8 From a list handed out by the Sierra Club during the "Richmond Toxic Tour."
9 The National Alliance of Breast Cancer Organizations, located in New York
10 The San Francisco Bay area has the highest breast cancer rates in the world, according to a recent WHO study.
11 Greenpeace Magazine, "Eco-Notes," Vol. 14, No. 5, September/October, 1989.
12 Hawkes, N; Lean, G.; Leigh, D.; et al: Chernobyl: The End of the Nuclear Dream, Vintage Press, New York, 1986.
13 Gofman, John W., MD, Ph.D.: Preventing Breast Cancer: The Story of a Major, Proven, Preventable Cause of This Disease, Committee for Nuclear Responsibility, San Francisco, CA, 1996.
14 Proctor, Robert N.: Cancer Wars, BasicBooks of HarperCollins, New York, NY, 1995, p. 62.
15 According to Theo Colborn, zoologist author of Our Stolen Future (Dutton, 1996), at a meeting in San Francisco in March, 1996.
16 Russell, Dick; Lewis, Sanford; Keating, Brian: Inconclusive by Design, Environmental Health Network and National Toxics Campaign, 1992, p.2.
17 New York Times, December 14, 1992, p. A12.