A Cancer in the System:

Why  are the government and the big charities ignoring the  environmental causes of cancer?

 4th January 2000

There is no notion so flawed that society will not, at some time,adopt  it as a universal truth. Few misconceptions are  as  wide spread 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 pounds90  million 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  out lines 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?