 |
 n 1964, two senior scientists
at the National Cancer Institute, Wilhelm Hueper and W.C. Conway, wrote,
"Cancers of all types and all causes display, even under already existing
conditions, all the characteristics of an epidemic in slow motion."
The unfolding epidemic was being fueled, they said, by "increasing
contamination of the human environment with chemical and physical carcinogens
and with chemicals supporting and potentiating their action."
 Their words were met with silence.
The World Health Organization (WHO)
maintains and analyzes cancer mortality (death) data from 70 countries.
WHO research shows that industrialized countries have far more cancers than
countries with little industry (after adjusting for age and population size).
One-half of all the world's cancers occur among people living in industrialized
countries, even though such people are only one-fifth of the world's population.
From these data, WHO has concluded that at least 80 percent of all cancer
is attributable to environmental influences.
In the United States, the cancer
epidemic described by Hueper and Conway in 1964 has been progressing steadily.
In 1950, 25 percent of adults in the United States could expect to get cancer
during their lifetimes; today about 40 percent of us (38.3 percent of women,
48.2 percent of men) can expect to get cancer. Omitting lung cancer from
the statistics, the incidence (occurrence) of cancer increased 35 percent
in the United States between 1950 and 1991. If we include lung cancers,
then cancer incidence increased 49.3 percent between 1950 and 1991.
Viewing the same phenomenon from
another vantage point: white women born in the United States in the 1940s
have experienced 30 percent more non-smoking-related cancers than did women
of their grandmothers' generation (women born between 1888 and 1897).
Among men, the differences are even
sharper. White men born in the 1940s have more than twice as much non-tobacco-related
cancer as their grandfathers did at the same age. (Historic data are missing
for non-whites.)
In the United States today, in the
age group 35 to 64, cancer is the number one killer. Because of this fact
alone, one might expect that the nation would welcome a book by a qualified
scientist examining all the lines of evidence linking cancer to chemical
contamination of the environment AND OFFERING SOLUTIONS.
But one would be disappointed in
that expectation. Sandra Steingraber's new book, Living Downstream An
Ecologist Looks At Cancer and the Environment, has been greeted with
nearly total silence. Appearing under the imprint of an important house,
Addison-Wesley, the book is a major publishing event hard back, 270 pages,
including 77 pages of references in small type at the back. At age 38, the
author is an accomplished researcher, writer and teacher with a Ph.D. in
biology from University of Michigan who has obviously spent years preparing
the manuscript, visiting special libraries, interviewing cancer researchers,
and applying her scientific training to the diverse evidence linking cancer
to environmental contamination.
Furthermore, the book is beautifully
written. Steingraber (who has previously published a volume of poetry, Post-diagnosis)
has the rare gift of combining poignant, lyrical prose with scientific exactitude
and clarity. She is among the rarest of scientists those who see the extraordinary
among the ordinary and who can write so well that her readers are transported
effortlessly through the complexities of an arcane topic like cancer cell
biology. Indeed, Steingraber displays an encyclopedic knowledge of cancer
biology, yet she conveys it in terms than anyone can grasp and appreciate.
Simultaneously, she is careful to note the limitations of scientific knowledge.
She never oversteps the bounds of what is really known, what is suspected
but unproven, and what is merely informed speculation.
By any measure, Living Downstream
is an extraordinary work extraordinarily easy (even pleasurable) to read,
extraordinarily thoughtful and evenhanded (even gentle, generous and forgiving)
in its treatment of a politically charged topic, and extraordinarily informative,
thought-provoking, and useful.
Yet the book has been ignored. It
appeared in May of this year, but a search this week of several hundred
of the nation's newspapers (via the online Dow Jones News Service) reveals
that Steingraber's book has been reviewed in only four places in the Portland
Oregonian, the Chicago Tribune, USA Today, and deep
within a "new science books" column in the Washington Post.
In essence, the existence of this book has been blacked out by most of the
nation's press. Like Wilhelm Hueper before her, Sandra Steingraber has (so
far) been met with a stony silence.
The book is simultaneously a detective
story Steingraber investigating Tazewell County, Illinois, where she grew
up, looking for clues to the rare bladder cancer that she herself contracted
at age 20 and a thorough scientific treatise (thankfully, one that is easy
to read) on the relationship of cancer-causing chemicals to human and animal
health.
Steingraber examines the following
lines of evidence indicating that certain chemicals (and radiation) can
cause cancer in living things:
- Cancer in workers exposed to chemicals;
- Studies of non-worker human populations exposed to chemicals
out of ignorance or by accident or by misguided public policy (for example,
studies of humans who contract cancers from exposure to chlorinated drinking
water);
- Cancer in immigrants who soon exhibit the cancer rates
of their adopted countries, rather than the cancer rates of the place where
they were born;
- Maps showing more cancers in urban areas than in rural;
- Maps showing more cancers in rural counties with heavy
pesticide use vs. rural counties with low pesticide use;
- Individual studies revealing cancer clusters near chemical
factories and near particularly-polluted rivers, valleys and dumps;
- Rising rates of childhood cancer. The lifestyles of children
have not changed much in 50 years; they do not smoke, drink alcohol, or
hold stressful jobs, yet childhood cancers are steadily rising;
- Cancer in fish and shellfish living in polluted bodies
of water. In North America there are now liver tumor epizootics (the wildlife
equivalent of epidemics) in 16 species of fish in at least 25 different
fresh- and salt-water locations, each of which is chemically polluted.
In contrast, liver cancer among members of the same species who inhabit
unpolluted waters is virtually nonexistent.
- Many kinds of cancer that can be induced in laboratory
animals by exposing them to certain chemicals;
- Cellular studies indicating that certain chemicals can
cause cell growth and division;
- Studies showing that chemicals can damage the immune
system and the endocrine system, promoting cancers.
Yet, despite the abundance of evidence,
science can never prove beyond all doubt that the chemicalization of the
human economy is responsible for a substantial fraction of the cancer epidemic
we are experiencing. As Steingraber puts it, "Like the assembling of
a prehistoric animal's skeleton, this careful piecing together of evidence
can never furnish final or absolute answers. There will always be a few
missing parts..." She then goes on to explain in detail why science
can never provide proof positive when confronted by a problem as complex
as environment and health.
However, the limitations of science
do not render us helpless. In her introduction, Steingraber notes that,
as she was writing the last pieces of the book in late 1996, the news broke
that scientists had finally found the agent in cigarette smoke that causes
lung cancer. Yet, she points out, she herself grew up protected from cigarette
smoke by her parents and teachers, and by public policies that kept cigarette
smoke out of restaurants, hospitals and many other public spaces actions
taken and public policies created by people "who had the courage to
act on partial evidence." The courage to act on partial evidence. This
is a key concept. It underlies the principle of precautionary action.
Yet many scientists and policy makers
exhibit a hushed complicity tantamount to cowardice, afraid to speak out
about what they themselves believe to be true: that cancer is caused by
exposure to carcinogens and that enormous suffering could be avoided if
we would reduce our exposures to cancer-causing chemicals in air, water,
and food.
Steingraber says again and again
cancer cells are created, not born. Current science tells us that, at most,
5 to 10 percent of cancer is caused by defective inherited genes. This means
that 90 to 95 percent of cancer is created by encounters with carcinogens
during a person's lifetime. Yet the modern trend is to focus on the genetic
causes of cancer. This deflects attention away from the preventable causes
of cancer. As Steingraber says, "Shining the spotlight on inheritance
focuses us on the one piece of the puzzle we can do absolutely nothing about."
She personalizes this as follows:
"I had bladder cancer as a young adult. If I tell people this fact,
they usually shake their heads. If I go on to mention that cancer runs in
my family, they usually start to nod. She is from one of those cancer
families, I can almost hear them thinking. Sometimes I just leave it
at that. But, if I am up for blank stares, I add that I am adopted and go
on to describe a study of cancer among adoptees that found correlations
within their adoptive families but not within their biological ones....
At this point, most people become very quiet.
"These silences remind me how
unfamiliar many of us are with the notion that families share environments
as well as chromosomes or with the concept that our genes work in communion
with substances streaming in from the larger, ecological world. What runs
in families does not necessarily run in blood. And our genes are less an
inherited set of teacups enclosed in a cellular china cabinet than they
are plates used in a busy diner. Cracks, chips, and scrapes accumulate.
Accidents happen."
Steingraber says we will have to
adopt a new way of thinking about chemicals. "This requires a human
rights approach," she says. "Such an approach recognizes that
the current system of regulating the use, release, and disposal of known
and suspected carcinogens rather than preventing their generation in the
first place is intolerable." Such a practice shows "reckless disregard
for human life."
And: "When carcinogens are deliberately
or accidentally introduced into the environment, some number of vulnerable
persons are consigned to death. The impossibility of tabulating an exact
body count does not alter this fact."
We, being more blunt than Sandra
Steingraber, draw from this that murder is murder even if the victim is
anonymous. And scientists, risk assessors, and regulators who grease the
wheels for such a system even if only by their complicit silence have blood
on their hands. They are the enablers of a system that profoundly violates
the human rights of the thousands (or millions) whom it victimizes. |
rachel.clark.net Email subscriptions are still available for free.