[NYTr] Cancer Terrorists Unmasked

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Counterpunch - Nov 21, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.org/mckenna11212007.html

Devra Davis On the Offensive Cancer Terrorists Unmasked

By BRIAN McKENNA

Last month a close friend of mine, a man in his late 40s, got cancer.
It was of the colon. He now confronts an uncertain future but his
prognosis is good. He's an unrelenting fighter so my bet is that he'll
join me in the cancer survivor's club. Mine was melanoma, back in 1992.

These days whenever I think of cancer I think of another cancer
fighter, a cultural warrior named Devra Davis. Her new book, "The
Secret History of the War on Cancer" is a disturbing, beautifully
rendered work that details how corporate suppression, government
inaction and social amnesia have combined to cause an epidemic that
makes a mockery of President Nixon's War on Cancer in 1971.

Ten million cancers over the last thirty years were entirely
preventable argues Davis.

Secret History was twenty years in the making. In 1986 Davis was
offered a hefty advance to write a book on all that was then known
about cancer prevention. When she informed her boss at the National
Academy of Sciences, an arm of the federal government, about the offer
he told her that she would lose her job if she wrote it. Davis, now 61,
is Director of Environmental Oncology at the University of Pittsburgh.
With more than 170 peer reviewed publications, an extensive career as a
Presidential appointed governmental researcher, and a National Book
Award bronze medal under her belt (for When Smoke Ran Like Water in
2002) anything Davis writes on cancer commands widespread attention.

Consider her assessment of aspartame. An artificial sweetener now
widely used in cookies, cakes and candies around the world, aspartame
was judged to be unsafe by the FDA in the 1970s after widespread
testing. It was suspected of being a possible cancer causer. In 1977
the FDA formally asked the US attorney general to indict Searle
corporation, aspartame's major producer, for knowingly making false and
misleading statements about aspartame's safety. Searle responded by
hiring a top Washington official, formerly with the Defense Department,
to be its chief Executive officer. Aspartame was defeated in 1980 when
the FDA review board voted unanimously against its approval. Then, in
1981, after Ronald Reagan's election, Searle reapplied for approval,
and its CEO "called in my marks" at the FDA. Within a year aspartame
was approved for all liquids and vitamins. The name of the CEO? Donald
Rumsfeld.

It sometimes seems that the entire Bush team cut its eyeteeth on
undermining cancer prevention efforts. It is true for my cancer. It is
not well known that sunscreen is a cause of melanoma since it generally
does not protect well against UVA rays. People sopping on the gook or
sprays have a false sense of security in the sun. But the FDA has not
changed sunscreen labels to alert consumers of this fact. In contrast,
the European Union, in 2006, did so, arguing that claims like
"sunblockers" and "total protection" do not exist. Back in 1999 after
the FDA began making motions to require truth in labeling, sunscreen
manufacturers responded with an intensive lobbying effort via their
trade group the Cosmetics, Toiletries and Fragrance Association. As a
result the FDA was persuaded not to implement the rules. Leading the
lobbying charge was a former White House lawyer named John Roberts.
Today he sits as the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Davis's revelations come with relentless force. Pap smears, the life
saving test for cervical cancer, were held up for more than a decade
because of fears it would undermine the private practice of medicine.

Sir Richard Doll, of Oxford University, perhaps the most esteemed
cancer epidemiologist in the world for decades, and one who discounted
most environmental causes to cancer, was, in fact, secretly in the
employ of chemical companies like Monsanto for years.

Many of the official leaders in the cancer war, like Armand Hammer,
came from firms that produced cancer-causing substances. Throughout the
1980s the National Cancer Institute's advisory board included Hammer,
the CEO of Occidental Petroleum which produced more than 100 billion
tons of toxic materials.

The "War on Cancer" is a war against science, broadly defined. When
scientists reveal uncomfortable truths about cancer etiologies they
often find their funding cut and reputations sullied. Other researchers
get the message. Companies like Dow Chemical cut cancer funding in this
way. When Marvin Legator pursued research on benzene's affects on
workers as part of a well-funded consultantship to Dow Chemical to
conduct toxicology at the University of Texas Medical Branch, he was
stunned to find severe chromosomal damage to workers. Dow cut his
funding.

Davis pinpoints precisely how corporations have mastered the art of
"doubt promotion," gearing up their PR machines to cause citizens to
question anything a critical scientist reports. It worked for tobacco
for decades and still does. Moreover the epistemological (how we know
what we know) basis about what gets regarded as "truth," has been
severely undermined. This means, for example, that corporations have
succeeded in persuading powerful groups that animal studies are OK for
determining the efficacy for highly profitable chemotherapy drugs but
not for the (profit hurting) actual causes of cancer!

Corporations can cover-up knowledge about how their workers are
becoming ill or dying under the rubric of trade secrets. Entire towns
like Mossville, Louisiana are purchased in part so that cancer
researchers cannot investigate health harms.

"The War on Cancer has been stymied because we focused only on
attacking the disease while ignoring what causes it," said Davis in an
interview. In a nutshell, what causes it is the
medical-military-industrial-academic complex obsessed with profits,
hierarchical control and trade secrets. In a time of severely weakened
public funding, universities are more often knowledge factories serving
corporations than outspoken civic guardians. And corporations will
often do whatever it takes to get risky products approved.

This story is being repeated again and again today. Cell phones,
implicated in brain cancer in some studies, are the subject of warnings
by Great Britain and Germany, but not the U.S. Children are especially
at risk.

Shampoos containing a clear colorless liquid know as "1, 4-dioxane"
causes cancer in animals and is banned from cosmetics by the European
Union. The FDA is silent.

And few emergency room physicians are aware of the dangers of CT scans,
which have increased tenfold in recent years. A CT scan of a child's
stomach is equivalent to about 600 chest x-rays, making them more
vulnerable to cancer later in their lifetimes.

The Secret History of the War on Cancer is a multi-layered treasure
trove of a shadow history leading from Hypocrates to Ramazinni to Nazi
Germany, which ironically was the first country to ban smoking in
public places. The Nazis were simply implementing the work of a
spectacular 1936 conference in Brussels on the environmental causes of
cancer. Yes, it turns out that a great deal was known environmental and
workplace causes of cancer but ignored by most of the industrial world.
In her investigations Davis was shocked to learn about this
International Congress of Scientific and Social Campaign against
Cancer, where 200 of the world's top scientists convened. She calls it
a "a veritable Manhattan Project on cancer."

"Many of your late relatives and mine might still be with us if the
things these eminent women and men of science knew about the causes of
cancer in 1936 had entered mainstream medical practice," writes Davis.

Cancer strikes terror into its victims and relief is sought at any
cost. Existentially adrift and facing one's mortality you search for
meaning in an alienated world. Alas, there's something that can be
done! Doctors, nurses and social workers reassure you that someone
cares. Whether it's cancer of the colon, breast, prostrate, lung, skin
or testes, there's a multi-billion dollar armatarium of CT scans,
chemotherapy and surgeries awaiting to relieve you. But rarely, if
ever, does the medical establishment address the probable social and
environmental causes of your disease. Teachable moments fade.

In essence this silent spring of medical speech serves to aid and abet
the larger social forces that helped place you in their clinics in the
first place! Besides, there's little or no money in prevention.

Davis will have none of it.

Inspired by South Africa, Davis calls for a Truth and Reconciliation
Commission movement in the United States to pressure corporations to
release the great amount of information they have sequestered about
worker's health and cancer risks. Presently this data is off limits
because of "trade secrets."

Davis' book signals the need for a revolution in medical education,
public health and the social world at large. It is a rallying call. The
book is capable of sending shock waves through the culture. With our
help it can.

[Brian McKenna was a reader for Devra Davis's book in its writing
stages.]