Elusive victory

Wednesday, August 29, 2007

By Devra Davis

The best wars finish fast.  Close to 40 years and $40 billion since the official launch of the “War on Cancer” in 1971, that effort shows no signs of ending. Half of all men and a third of all women will contract the disease, and more than one in four citizens of developed nations will die from it.

Accounts of breathtaking advances in cancer research provide a steady rumble today, but talk of imminent victory has grown muted. In recent years, cancer deaths have dropped chiefly because fewer are smoking and more are getting screened and treated for survivable cancers like those of the colon, cervix and breast.

But lately, cancer is showing up in neighborhoods and at ages where it used to be quite rare. As a world-class athlete, Lance Armstrong is unique; as a survivor of advanced cancer, he is not. Of the 10 million cancer survivors in the U.S. today, one in 10 is under age 40.

 By the 20th century, sitting behind a desk, dispensing medical advice or multi-tasking with the help of cell phones, computers and GPS seemed far safer ways to earn a living. But are they? In the past decade, cancer claimed more than half the men and women in science and medicine whose New York Times obituary listed any cause of death – that’s twice the rate of the rest of us.

In the Science Citation Index, Dr. Ronald Herberman wrote one of the 100 most influential papers in the world.  He and his brother Harvey trained as physicians more than 40 years ago. When they reached middle age, the two of them joined an even rarer class – the growing number of doctors with the same unusual cancer of the blood. No one in their family had ever developed the disease.

Could their common ailment have had anything to do with the fact that they grew up in pesticide-sprayed areas in the 1950s, built and repaired model airplanes, worked in laboratories without protective equipment, and completed various home improvement projects with epoxies and other modern miracles? We can’t know. But we do know they are not alone.

From the start, the cancer effort has made astonishing advances in treating and finding the disease, but left unscathed known carcinogens like radiation, benzene, asbestos and other toxic materials, including, until quite recently, tobacco. The enterprise has virtually ignored the incompletely tested 80,000 industrial chemicals found – in infinite combinations– in everything from cosmetics to carpet glue.

Around the world today, medical centers are launching massive efforts to rid buildings and grounds of groups of proven and suspected toxic agents. We are doing this not because we know it will reduce the incidence of cancer, but because, as professionals who have devoted our lives to fighting this disease, we strongly believe it will.

Like Hackensack Medical University, Beth Israel Hospital, University of Texas Nursing School at Houston, Kaiser Permanente and others, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center is moving our more than 400 medical facilities to use less toxic materials to reduce the chances that anyone’s brother will develop cancer.

We would never take all the drugs in our medicine cabinets at once. Yet, our regulatory system today looks at any suspect cancer hazard – whether CT scans, aspartame, cell phones or a new adhesive – as protected trade secrets to which exposure only occurs one at a time. This approach defies both common sense and basic biology by assuming that just because a single agent may look all right where it has been tested on adult animals, we and our children can safely encounter hundreds of such materials through the mixtures of modern life.

Drug companies explicitly look for drug interactions in coming up with warnings about combining various medications. Regulators need to adopt a similar approach to environmental hazards. We must address the combined risks of tiny amounts of hazardous agents, many of which did not exist thirty years ago.
 
Today’s trade secrets may turn out to have cost my father and Ron Herberman’s brother their lives. We need to create a Truth and Reconciliation Commission where producers of modern products open their workplace health  files to independent examination. If we want the world of the future to be healthier, we can start with ending the protection of toxic trade secrets and taking more realistic looks at the combined impacts of modern agents on our lives.
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Elusive victory | Planet JH News Article: Editorial

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