A propósito del día mundial del cáncer, va un artículo impactante (en inglés) según el cual, el incremento del cáncer se debe a carninógenos industriales que están en nuestros alimentos, cosméticos, deodorizadores, medicinas, abuso de mamografías, etc. Cuidado, con el cáncer no se juega!.
Cancer: It’s a Growth Industry
David Ross interviews Dr. Samuel Epstein, Z magazine, October 2003
Dr. Samuel Epstein is emeritus professor of environmental medicine at the University of Illinois School of Public Health, and chair of the Cancer Prevention Coalition. He has published some 260 peer reviewed articles, and authored or co-authored 10 books including the prize-winning The Politics of Cancer, The Safe Shopper’s Bible, The Breast Cancer Prevention Program, and The Politics of Cancer, Revisited. Epstein has worked internationally and domestically providing testimony, consulting, and drafting legislation. For decades he has doggedly exposed the National Cancer Institute and the American Cancer Society for losing the winnable war on cancer.
DAVID ROSS (DR): What is the impact of cancer on society and what are the stated causes of cancer?
SAMUEL EPSTEIN (SE): Over recent decades, the incidence of cancer has escalated to epidemic proportions, now striking nearly one in every two men, and over one in every three women in their lifetimes. Even more disturbing is the recent recognition that this very high incidence of cancer is going to increase further still and, by the year 2050, it will be doubling the current very high incidence rate.
If you look at a cancer called non-Hodgkin’s Iymphoma (the cancer from which Jackie Kennedy died), over the last few decades, the incidence has gone up by nearly 100 percent. When you look at brain cancer, the incidence has gone up about 80 or 90 percent. When you look at breast cancer, it’s gone up about 60 or 65 percent. When you look at testicular cancer, particularly in men between the ages of 28-35, it’s gone up, believe it or not, nearly 300 percent. When you look at childhood cancers, depending on the particular cancer, the incidence has gone up as high as 40-50 percent. These are all non-smoking cancers.
The public is under the general impression that the real increase in cancer rates is due to smoking. There’s no question that smoking is the single most important cause of all cancer, however, when you look at the data, lung cancer and other smoking-related cancers account for between one-third and one-quarter of the increased incidence of all cancers. Incidentally, the incidence of lung cancer in men is being sharply reduced because men are giving up smoking, while in women it is increasing.
Is it because people are living longer that they’re getting more cancers? The answer to that is no, because when we talk about cancer incidence rates, we adjust them to reflect the increasing longevity of the population.
Can genetics be the possible reason for this major increase in cancer? Not at all. There’s no chance whatsoever that the genetics of human populations has changed in the last 40-50 years. It takes tens of thousands of years for genetic effects in the general population to change. So one can exclude genetics and sharply limit the role of smoking.
What about fatty diet? There’s really little evidence that fat is a risk factor for cancer. For instance, if you look at Mediterranean countries, they have extremely high fat consumption, particularly olive oil, which can be as high as 40 percent of the diet. But the rates of cancers, particularly reproductive cancers, are low. However, you find strong relationships between the consumption of animal and dairy fats and some cancers. But that’s a reflection of the fact that these are highly contaminated with a wide range of industrial, chemical, and petrochemical carcinogens.
There has been a massive escalation in the incidence of cancer that cannot be explained away on the basis of smoking, longevity, genetics, or a fatty diet.
The National Cancer Institute -NCI (a governmental or federal institution, which taxpayers pay for) and the American Cancer Society -ACS (the world’s largest non-profit, a so-called “charity”), the american cancer establishment, try to explain away cancer by what’s called, “blame the victim.” If you get cancer, it’s your fault. You smoke too much. It’s a fatty diet.” Or they claim it’s because people are spending too much time in the sun. There’s no question that malignant melanoma and skin cancer will result from spending too much time in the sun, but that has nothing to do with any of the other major cancers that I mentioned-brain cancer, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, breast, testicular, and childhood cancers. They parallel this emphasis on blame the victim by ignoring, to all intents and purposes, a vast body of scientific information on avoidable causes or risk factors of cancer.
What, then, are their policies? First of all, they confuse the public by using the words “secondary prevention.” By that they mean screening, diagnosis, and the use of chemicals, vitamins, etc. to help reduce cancer risks due to past exposures to carcinogens. So when they talk about how much money they spend on prevention, not only is there gross exaggeration, but they also, by using the word secondary prevention, mislead the public. The cancer establishment is fixated on what I call, “damage control”-the screening, diagnosis, and treatment of cancer, as opposed to prevention.
For example, occupation is a major cause of cancer in men and, to a lesser extent, breast cancer in women. In children, too, because children whose parents work in plants during the pregnancy of the wife, have major excesses of childhood cancer. Their parents also carry occupational carcinogens into the home and they are exposed to carcinogens themselves, which are absorbed into their bloodstream.
Of the NCI’s $4.5 billion dollar yearly budget, the amount of money the NCI spends on in-house research on occupational cancer is $15 million dollars, which is less than one percent. Of the ACS’s budget on cancer prevention, the money spent on occupational, environmental, and other preventable causes of cancer is less than 0.1 percent.
Many of us have charged the cancer establishment with major responsibility for losing the winnable war against cancer. The Chronicle of Philanthropy, the leading American charity watchdog stated, “The American Cancer Society is more interested in accumulating wealth than saving lives.”
DR: What are the conflicts of interest between NCI, the American Cancer Society, and industry?
SE: The conflicts of interest extend particularly to the mammography industry-the machine and film industry. We have excellent data showing that pre-menopausal mammography is not only ineffective, but is also dangerous for a variety of reasons, including the high doses of radiation. Two films of a breast in a pre-menopausal woman gives that woman about 500 times the dose of a chest X-ray. If a pre-menopausal woman gets a mammography every year over a ten-year period, the dosages of radiation can well amount to about ten rads-a rad is a “radiation absorbed dose,” a measure of radiation exposure. Radiation from routine pre-menopausal mammography reaches reasonably close to the kind of dosage that women got in Hiroshima and Nagasaki outside of the major epicenter where the atom bomb was exploded. Nevertheless, a radiologist will tell women, when asked if there’s any problem with the radiation, “Well my dear,” and they’ll call them by their first name, “not at all. It’s just the same as spending a few days in Denver or taking a transatlantic flight.” This is deception and manipulation.
The conflicts of interest are not only with the mammography industry. The relationships between NCI, ACS, and the cancer drug industry are a matter of record. In fact, the previous director of the National Cancer Institute said we must recognize that the NCI has become a “governmental pharmaceutical industry. “
As taxpayers we pay for a great deal of research on drugs for cancer treatment. What happens when the research and development is done? When a drug starts looking hopeful, that drug and all its backup research is then passed on to industry that charges massively high prices to consumers. For instance, citizens paid for the research and development of Taxol and then it’s passed over to Bristol Meyers Squibb who can charge up to 30-50 times more for the same drug. So the taxpayer pays twice.
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