TEXT SIZE
E-MAIL
PRINT
MANAGE YOUR SUBSCRIPTIONAn Epidemic Of Deception
Why We Can't Trust The Cancer Establishment — An Interview With Samuel Epstein
A thousand Americans die every day from cancer. Almost everyone knows at least one casualty. My grandfather died of bladder cancer, my great-aunt of stomach cancer. I’ve lost several cousins and family friends to breast cancer. Just today, I heard that an old acquaintance has skin cancer.
According to Dr. Samuel Epstein, one of the world’s foremost authorities on the carcinogenic effects of toxic and industrial pollutants in air, water, the workplace, and consumer products, most of these deaths are preventable. But cancer prevention in this society has, according to Epstein, come to mean primarily two things: (1) stopping smoking; and (2) chemoprevention, such as taking the highly profitable prescription drug tamoxifen to try to prevent breast cancer. Sometimes it includes diet and exercise. But missing from most discussions of prevention — intentionally missing, says Epstein — is any mention of the probable cause of the current cancer epidemic: the poisoning of our entire planet.
It isn’t really news that the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the foods we eat are all contaminated with carcinogens. Some toxicologists are predicting that the future of humankind could be slow suicide by poison. Yet, Epstein asserts, environmental toxins are ignored in cancer research, because reducing them doesn’t serve the interests of chemical and pharmaceutical companies and the “cancer establishment” — mainly the National Cancer Institute and the American Cancer Society.
Epstein has been fighting the cancer establishment for more than thirty years. His prize-winning 1978 book The Politics of Cancer (Sierra Club Books) , a 770-page tome, has become something of a holy text to many who are combating polluting industries. An updated version appeared in 1998 from East Ridge Press. He is also the author of The Safe Shopper’s Bible (Macmillan, 1995) and The Breast Cancer Prevention Program (Macmillan, 1998), among others. He has worked closely with many Congressional committees and provided key expert testimony that helped to ban such hazardous pesticides as ddt, Aldrin, and Chlordane.
Epstein says there was no single moment when he decided to become an advocate. It just runs in his family. His father — a leading Talmudic scholar of this century and author of a seminal book on Jewish ethics, Faith of Judaism — “had a fanatic obsession with justice and human rights.”
Epstein’ s own passion for justice became evident early in his career as an m.d., when his boss, a prominent research doctor at a leading pediatric hospital in London, England, claimed to have discovered that massive doses of vitamin B12 cured one of the childhood cancers of the nervous system. Epstein was skeptical of the claim and, when unable to get the raw data any other way, waited till late at night, then broke into the safe containing the patients’ charts. His suspicions proved correct: the claim was bogus. When the hospital refused to stop the research — citing potential damage to its reputation — Epstein threatened to go public. Research was halted, but he resigned from his job to leave for the United States, where he established the first laboratories of environmental toxicology and carcinogenesis at Harvard in 1960.
In 1996, Epstein represented the European Union at World Trade Organization talks about the use of genetically engineered hormones in meat production. He has been president or chair of many organizations, including the Rachel Carson Council (for nearly two decades), the Society of Occupational and Environmental Health, and at present the Cancer Prevention Coalition, and he recently won the Right Livelihood Award, commonly known as the Alternative Nobel Prize. He is currently professor emeritus of environmental and occupational medicine at the University of Illinois School of Public Health in Chicago.
Because Epstein is so busy, I had a difficult time scheduling this interview. We finally met at his Chicago apartment on a hot Labor Day morning, a day after he flew in from Los Angeles and a day before he was scheduled to fly off to London. Epstein is courteous in the extreme and speaks with a clipped British accent. We talked in his spotless office, which was beautifully decorated and lined with bookshelves. From a window, I could see Lake Michigan.
Jensen: You have written that, in the last few decades, “the incidence of cancer, including a wide range of nonsmoking cancers, has escalated to epidemic proportions, with lifetime cancer risks now approaching 50 percent.” That’s a pretty startling statistic.
Epstein: To be precise, the risk is approaching one in two for men and one in three for women. And that’s true not only in the United States, but in all major industrialized nations. If similar numbers of people contracted cholera or dysentery, the entire country would mobilize against the disease. Yet the extent of this epidemic has consistently been hidden — as well as it is possible to hide something so monumental — and its causes have routinely been mystified.
A hundred years ago, pneumonia and influenza were the top two causes of death in this country, followed by tuberculosis, infectious gastrointestinal diseases, and heart disease. Cancer was number eight, accounting for less than 4 percent of all deaths. Today, cancer is the second leading cause of death (after heart disease) and accounts for about 20 percent of deaths.
Now, some of this increase is due to a decrease in the number of deaths from the flu, tuberculosis, and so on. There is also the factor of increased longevity: living longer increases one’s chance of developing cancer. But these factors don’t come near to accounting for the total rise. Even within specific age groups, there is a greater cancer risk today than there was fifty years ago. In other words, a sixty-year-old man is much more likely to die of cancer today than was his counterpart fifty years ago. Cancer is now the only major deadly disease whose incidence is on the rise. Just between 1973 and 1994, the rate of cancer incidence increased by 23 percent — more than 1 percent per year. This increase is very real, and it persists even after statistically adjusting for an aging population and for smoking.
Jensen: So why are cancer rates increasing?
Epstein: I think the answer is terribly simple. Parallel to the escalating incidence of cancer, there has been an explosive expansion of technologies — particularly in the petrochemical industry, which really took off in the early forties. Between 1940 and 1990, the total annual production of synthetic organic chemicals increased from 1 billion to more than 600 billion pounds.
Over the last few decades, our total environment has become pervasively contaminated with a wide range of toxic and carcinogenic chemicals, some of which are persistent — that is, long-lived. When I say “total environment,” I mean our air, water, soil, consumer products, food, and workplace. Even our own body fats have become contaminated. This is true from the North Pole to the South, not only for humans but for a wide range of marine life and wildlife, as well.
Jensen: I remember reading that polar-bear fat is now contaminated with dioxin.
Epstein: Precisely. And at the same time that the total environment has become contaminated, multiple lines of evidence have linked different cancers with exposure to these various chemicals. First, there is evidence from rodent tests that the chemicals are carcinogenic. Second, we have seen major increases in cancer rates for domestic pets and among fish and wildlife populations. Finally, we have substantial evidence of increased cancer rates in human populations exposed to various carcinogenic products or processes — especially in the workplace.
There are innumerable ways in which the general public is exposed involuntarily and unknowingly to avoidable industrial carcinogens, but workplace exposure is often the most clear-cut. There is usually well-documented knowledge of the hazards of working in certain industries, though the specific nature of these hazards, and their extent, sometimes remains poorly defined.
Although we have a massive escalation of the incidence of nonsmoking cancers, the extent of these increases is consistently trivialized by a variety of statistical manipulations, with the public’s attention focused on allegedly decreasing mortality rates that are largely accounted for by decreasing cancer mortality in smoking-related lung cancer in men. And the public is denied access to accurate information about the causes of nonsmoking cancers, which lies buried in government and industry files and in relatively inaccessible scientific literature.
Jensen: But everybody knows viscerally that cancer rates are up, because we all know someone who has died of cancer.
Epstein: That perception may be common among people you talk to, but in the wider society, I think the cheerleaders at the New York Times, the American Cancer Society, the National Cancer Institute, and the various carcinogenic industries are all doing an extraordinary job of keeping the lid on information about this epidemic.
Jensen: You may have a point. My grandfather died of bladder cancer when I was four, but until I read your book, I never really considered that saccharin probably killed him. He was a diabetic and ate saccharin at every meal.
Epstein: Saccharin has been extensively tested over the last five decades, but most of those studies are still unpublished, because they were done by industry or government. Nonetheless, the animal tests and human studies to which we do have access show a clear connection between bladder cancer and saccharin.
Overall, the public is tragically misinformed about the causes of cancer. People are under the impression that the overwhelming cause of cancer is smoking. While there’s no question that smoking is the single most important cause of cancer, lung cancer accounts for only about one-quarter of the overall cancer increase since 1950. And at least 20 percent of lung cancers are caused by factors other than smoking. The really major increases in cancer incidence have been in a wide range of non-smoking-related cancers, such as prostate cancer, multiple myeloma, and non-Hodgkin’s lymphomas, with rates having gone up 200 percent for each. Brain cancer in adults is up 80 percent; testicular cancer, up 110 percent (up nearly 300 percent in men aged twenty to thirty-five); breast cancer and male colon cancer, each up about 60 percent; and childhood brain cancer, up about 40 percent. And while the number of deaths from smoking-related cancers is in a fairly substantial decline for men, it’s still on the increase for women.
These figures apply to major industrialized nations. In less-industrialized countries, the danger is probably even greater. The major industrialized nations at least have the basis of a regulatory structure, however grossly imperfect. But the less-industrialized countries are now faced with two problems: major increases in smoking, and the rush to cash in on the global economy. So there’s a headlong move toward industrialization without any recognition of the hazards involved.
Europe provides a powerful example of this dynamic. In many ways, Europe can be divided into three economic tiers: At the top of the heap are the Nordic countries. France and Germany are in the middle. And at the bottom of the pile, you’ve got Greece, Portugal, and their peers. In Greece and Portugal, the pressure to industrialize is so heavy that we’re now seeing a major — and, so far, successful — effort by the Canadian asbestos industry to establish large asbestos-manufacturing and -processing facilities there.
Asbestos, of course, is a major carcinogen, and debate about its use is the prototypical example of industry evasion concerning the carcinogenic effects of a profitable product. Asbestos is virtually indestructible, highly resistant to fire, and has great tensile strength. It’s used in cement, asphalt, wallboard, pipes, textiles, insulation, food and beverage processing, brake linings, and so on. Unfortunately, its use leads to about fifty thousand deaths per year, in the U.S. alone, from cancer and lung diseases.
As long ago as 1918, enough was known about the dangers of asbestos to lead U.S. and Canadian insurance companies to stop selling life insurance to asbestos workers. Since then, numerous studies have linked exposure to asbestos with asbestosis, lung cancer, and a host of other deadly diseases. Yet, from the beginning, the asbestos industry fought any sort of regulation of workplace conditions, stating (and this tactic will be familiar to anyone who has paid attention to the tobacco industry) that asbestos doesn’t really cause cancer or other diseases — and that, even if it did, getting rid of the cancer risk would result in severe economic dislocation and unemployment. Then, during a lawsuit in the 1970s, a series of industry documents was discovered — the “Asbestos Pentagon Papers,” I dubbed them — showing that the industry had known all along how dangerous asbestos is and had worked tirelessly to suppress studies and spread disinformation.
The danger, by the way, is not only to asbestos workers. Mine wastes have contaminated drinking water, construction sites are often heavily contaminated, and the use of asbestos in so many products virtually guarantees that everyone will be exposed to it.
Against this backdrop, the asbestos industry is moving aggressively into less-industrialized countries, which, in the global economy, are put in a position of valuing industrial growth over the health of their citizens. Because of their lesser wealth, the governments of Portugal and Greece will willingly expose their workers to risks the Scandinavians would never accept.
Jensen: That reminds me of an infamous quote by Lawrence Summers, then chief economist for the World Bank and now U.S. secretary of the treasury: “I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest-wage country is impeccable, and we should face up to that.”
Epstein: We see this attitude again and again, the world over.
Jensen: You mentioned the American Cancer Society and the National Cancer Institute. What are their roles in dealing with the cancer epidemic?
Epstein: The American Cancer Society (acs) is the world’s largest nonreligious charity. It takes in more than $600 million a year, ostensibly to fight cancer, and its cash reserves approach a billion dollars. But the vast majority of the acs’s budget goes for salaries, executive benefits, overhead, and other administrative expenses. Less than 16 percent of all the money raised is spent on direct services, such as driving cancer patients home from the hospital after chemo, or providing pain medication. And the acs’s money — even that used for research — is spent in ways guaranteed not to offend either big polluters or big pharmaceutical companies. Why? In part, because the board of the acs is closely interlocked with those same companies. So the acs has consistently come out in support of the pesticide industry, has actively campaigned against the Delaney Clause (a federal regulation banning the deliberate addition to food of any substance shown to cause cancer), and has refused to support the Clean Air Act. It’s shocking — or it would be, if it weren’t so consistent.
Personal. Political. Provocative. Subscribe to The Sun and save 55%.
SHARE
