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. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
