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On 12/7/17 9:34 AM, DW via Marxism wrote:
There is simply no evidence whatsoever that people who live in higher area
of background radiation are at all at risk for higher rates of cancer.
There were also reports that the people who lived in houses built near
Love Canal had lower incidence of cancer than people living elsewhere.
The problem is that cancer tends to develop later in life, long after
exposure to environmental factors first occurred. This is something I
wrote about here:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2014/08/29/cancer-politics-and-capitalism/
Several weeks before I watched “Second Opinion”, I made a point of
reading George Johnson’s recently published “The Cancer Chronicles” in
order to get up to speed on current thinking about the disease. As I
mentioned above, when I worked at MSKCC, I read Samuel Epstein’s “The
Politics of Cancer”, a book that ties what was perceived at the time as
a cancer epidemic to environmental toxins, especially pesticides. It was
very much in the spirit of Barry Commoner’s “The Closing Circle” and
amenable to my Marxist opposition to corporate indifference to our
health and safety.
About ten years after reading “The Politics of Cancer”, I read Robert
Proctor’s “The Cancer Wars” that backtracked from Epstein’s findings.
Although very much a man of the left, Proctor warned his readers that
finding a direct correlation between pollutants and cancer is very
difficult.
With Proctor’s warnings in the back of my mind, I was not completely
surprised by Johnson’s treatment of the environmental question. In
chapter seven, titled “Where Cancer Really Comes From”, Johnson amasses
some statistics of the sort that pro-industry hacks might repeat. For
example, epidemiology studies conclude that cancer cases in the
immediate vicinity of Love Canal were no greater than that in the rest
of New York State even though there was a spike in birth defects.
In referring to cancer clusters, such as the supposed breast cancer
epidemic in Long Island, Johnson concludes that they are “statistical
illusions”. It is not so much that Johnson denies that there is a
connection between cancer and the environment; it is that they are
exceedingly difficult to prove.
Since I have like most people on the left become convinced that there is
a connection between carcinogens in the water, soil and air and the
incidence of cancer, I emailed Johnson with my concerns and referred him
to a study of cancer clusters near heavily polluted rivers in China.
Showing a grace uncommon to most well-established journalists, Johnson
took the trouble to write back:
Thanks very much for your email. I appreciate the kind words about my
book. I hadn’t seen that particular study and will make a point of
reading it. Of course many industrial chemicals are carcinogenic, and it
seems very possible that concentrations have been high and chronic
enough in China’s water to expose the general population to levels known
to cause cancer in the workplace. Nailing that down is very tricky
though, especially in developing countries where epidemiological studies
are just getting underway. Most of the research in China seems to
concentrate on air pollution and lung cancer. Since the focus of my book
was on cancer in the developed world, I may write a column in the future
comparing the situation with China, India, etc.
Making the case about pollution—a negative indicator—is difficult but
just as much so with positive indicators. Nutritionists are always
urging us to eat fruits and vegetables, especially those with
anti-oxidant properties such as blueberries and cabbage but there has
never been a rigorous study of diet and cancer. This has a lot to do
with the near impossibility of conducting a demographically
representative study of the effects of eating “good” food and bad. Since
cancer can take many decades to show up, tracking its roots and
development is a near impossible task.
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