The Hype - We are Winning the Cancer War

The High Stakes of Cancer Prevention
by Samuel Epsterin and Liza Gross (in: Tikkun Magazine, Nov/Dec 2000)
Source: Cancer Prevention Coalition

It's hard to find someone these days who hasn't had firsthand experience with cancer. (Many people are) hoping to help find the magic bullet—a cure. That cure, we hear again and again, is just around the corner. And now, for the first time since President Richard Nixon launched the war on cancer in 1971, public officials are talking about an all-out effort to wipe out the disease in our lifetime. Cancer makes good politics. Who can argue against fighting cancer?

The cancer establishment has a long history of trivializing or ignoring prevention initiatives. Both the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the American Cancer Society (ACS) are fixated on damage control—screening, diagnosis, and treatment—and genetic research, and are largely indifferent to cancer prevention. For the American Cancer Society, that indifference approaches outright hostility.

This aversion to prevention is complicated by conflicts of interest springing from the cancer establishment's intimate connections with corporate America.

Don't Believe the Hype

Last March, newspapers across the country dutifully heralded a decline in cancer incidence and mortality, citing the latest annual report of the American Cancer Society, National Cancer Institute, and other cancer organizations.

Despite such celebrated claims of progress against the disease, the facts tell a different story.

• Overall five-year survival rates for all cancers have remained virtually static since 1970, from 49 to 54 percent for all races combined.
• Dr. John Bailar, formerly an epidemiologist at the NCI and now chair of the Department of Health Studies at the University of Chicago, has found that reduced mortality rates are more likely the result of earlier detection and diagnosis rather than improved cancer treatments.
• Cancer incidence has escalated to epidemic proportions over recent decades, with lifetime risks in the United States now reaching one in two for men and one in three for women.
• In 2000, more than 1.2 million new cancer diagnoses are expected, and some 550,000 Americans will die from the disease. The overall increase of all cancers from 1950 to 1995 was 55 percent.
• Meanwhile, the incidence of a wide range of non-smoking cancers, such as non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, multiple myeloma, and adult brain cancer, is increasing at proportionately greater rates, including an alarming rise in childhood cancer of over 20 percent.

What then is driving the modern cancer epidemic?

• Study after study points to the role of runaway industrial technologies, particularly those based on petrochemicals. The explosive growth of the petrochemical industry since the 1940s has …, produced a dizzying array of synthetic chemicals that have never been screened for human health effects: of the roughly 75,000 chemicals in use today, only some 3 percent have been tested for safety. For over fifty years, in other words, the American public has been unknowingly exposed to avoidable carcinogens from the moment of conception until death.