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Dear George Johnson, I am currently reading "Cancer Chronicles" and am really impressed by both the elegance of your writing and your erudition. I am a film critic and am doing some background research for a review of "Second Opinion: Laetrile at Sloan-Kettering" that opens in NY on Aug. 29. I used to work as a database administrator at Sloan-Kettering in the late 80s on patient registration systems and became interested in the "politics of cancer" as Samuel Epstein puts it, mostly as a function of my Marxist orientation. I read Epstein's book while there and Robert Proctor's much later on. I noticed that--unlike Epstein--Proctor was hesitant to make a link between pollution and cancer. All this was in the back of my mind when I began reading your account of Love Canal yesterday. I know that it is hard to argue with the data but I wonder whether your case would have been strengthened by a somewhat broader perspective. I have been paying pretty close attention to China over the past 30 years ever since the country abandoned socialism (even a distorted version) and plunged full speed ahead into capitalist development with zero concern over health and safety. I seemed to have recalled many reports on cancer clusters--so to speak--over the years. Refreshing my memory, I did a quick search and came up with this: http://igov.berkeley.edu/content/water-pollution-and-digestive-cancers-china
Water Pollution and Digestive Cancers in China author(s): Avi Ebenstein 2008 Following China’s economic reforms of the late 1970s, rapid industrialization has led to a deterioration of water quality in the country’s lakes and rivers. China’s cancer rate has also increased in recent years, and digestive cancers (i.e. stomach, liver, esophageal) now account for 11 percent of fatalities (WHO 2002) and nearly one million deaths annually. This paper examines a potential causal link between surface water quality and digestive cancers by exploiting variation in water quality across China’s river basins. Using a sample of 145 mortality registration points in China, I find using OLS that a deterioration of the water quality by a single grade (on a six-grade scale) is associated with a 9.3 percent increase in the death rate due to digestive cancer, controlling for observable characteristics of the Disease Surveillance Points (DSP). The analysis rules out other potential explanations for the observed correlation, such as smoking rates, dietary patterns, and air pollution. This link is also robust to estimation using 2SLS with rainfall and upstream manufacturing as instruments. As a consequence of the large observed relationship between digestive cancer rates and water pollution, I examine the benefits and costs of increasing China’s levy rates for firm dumping of untreated wastewater. My estimates indicate that doubling China’s current levies would save roughly 29,000 lives per year, but require an additional 500 million dollars in annual spending on wastewater treatment by firms, implying a cost of roughly 18,000 dollars per averted death. Attachment Size Pollution_in_China.pdf 904.88 KB
I know that you were not trying to write a comprehensive study of pollution and cancer but I was left with a worry that you were giving too much credence to an analysis I have seen over the years from your colleague at the NY Times Gina Kolata who has downplayed environmental factors to the point where she seems like a pro-chemical industry hack.
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