Pushback begins against new cancer report

The pushback to this year’s President’s Cancer Panel report published Thursday has already started.

Expect that criticism to swell. Big time. For this year the panel (which has been around since President Nixon’s administration) took the extraordinary step of focusing on cancer-causing chemicals and how the government — and the medical community — isn’t doing enough to understand and minimize their toxic effects on our bodies.

That finding is not going down well with the companies that produce the more than 80,000 chemicals currently in use in the United States. (Only a few hundred have been tested for safety, the report points out.) Nor is it popular with the manufacturers of other technologies cited in the report, such as the makers of potentially hazardous medical technologies that are all-too-often misused or overused. (“Many referring physicians, radiology professionals, and the public are unaware of the radiation dose associated with various tests or the total radiation dose and related increased cancer risk individuals may accumulate over a lifetime,” the report points out. “People who receive multiple scans or other tests that require radiation may accumulate doses equal to or exceeding that of Hiroshima atomic bomb survivors.”)

As Nicholas Kristof wrote in his New York Times column yesterday, the 200-plus page “landmark” report warns that “chemicals threaten our bodies” and that “our lackadaisical approach to regulation may have far-reaching consequences for our health.”

Such a viewpoint from this panel (which Kristoff calls “the Mount Everest of the medical mainstream” and whose two current members were appointed by President George Bush) is amazing.

Predictable opposition

I expected groups like the American Council on Science and Health to complain about the report, and it has. (ACSH is a non-profit group with strong ties to corporate interests, including the pharmaceutical, food and chemical industries. The exact amount of money it receives from these industries is unknown, for ACSH stopped disclosing its funding sources in the early 1990s.)

But I was a bit more (although not totally) surprised by the criticism from Dr. Michael Thun, an epidemiologist with the American Cancer Society. Here’s part of a statement he released online:

Unfortunately, the perspective of the report is unbalanced by its implication that pollution is the major cause of cancer, and by its dismissal of cancer prevention efforts aimed at the major known causes of cancer (tobacco, obesity, alcohol, infections, hormones, sunlight) as “focused narrowly.”

The report is most provocative when it restates hypotheses as if they were established facts. For example, its conclusion that “the true burden of environmentally (i.e. pollution) induced cancer has been grossly underestimated” does not represent scientific consensus. Rather, it reflects one side of a scientific debate that has continued for almost 30 years.

Unlike Thun, I didn’t find that the presidential panel’s report “dismissed” such lifestyle factors as smoking and sunbathing. In fact, it cites not smoking and not sunbathing as actions individuals can take to lower their risk.

Furthermore, the ACS doesn’t have that great a track record for being ahead of the curve on issues regarding the prevention of cancer, as epidemiologist Devra Davis points out in her book, “The Secret History of the War on Cancer”:

Some of the early leaders of the American Cancer Society and National Cancer Institute left their posts to work directly for the tobacco industry, where they funded major academic research programs throughout the world to foment uncertainty about the dangers of their product right up to the 1990s. While people may think of the ACS as a foremost supporter of research, in 2005 it reported spending less than 10 percent of its nearly $1 billion budget on independent scientific studies.

The life-saving test for cervical cancer, called the Pap smear, was not put into widespread use until more than a decade after it had been proven to prevent this disease, because of fears that it would undermine the private practice of medicine. These delays led to unnecessary surgery or death for millions of women.

What you can do now

While we wait for the government, the medical community and others to fight it out about what to do about the environmental influences on cancer risk (and, as the report details, there’s a lot that needs to be done), we can take some steps in our own lives to reduce our personal exposure to those influences. Here’s a summary of the actions recommended by the panel:

• Parents and childcare providers: “[C]hoose foods, house and garden products, play spaces, toys, medicines, and medical tests that will minimize children’s exposure to toxins.”

• Would-be parents (moms and dads): “[A]void exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals and known or suspected carcinogens prior to a child’s conception and throughout pregnancy and early life, when risk of damage is greatest.”

• Remove your shoes before entering your home.

• If you work with potentially cancer-causing chemicals, wash your work clothes separately from the rest of your family’s laundry.

• Filter your home tap water, and use filtered tap water instead of commercially bottled water.

• Store and carry water in stainless steel, glass or BPS- and phthalate-free containers.

• Microwave food and beverages in ceramic or glass containers, not plastic ones.

• As much as possible, choose foods grown without pesticides or chemical fertilizers. And wash conventionally grown produce. (Washing removes some, but not all, of the chemical residues).

• As much as possible, eat free-range meats raised without exposure to antibiotics, growth hormones and toxic run-off.

• Minimize your consumption of processed, charred and well-done meats.

• Use household and garden products made with non-toxic substances or environmentally safe chemicals.

• Don’t smoke, and eliminate your exposure to second-hand smoke.

• Wear protective clothing and sunscreen when outdoors to avoid overexposure to ultraviolet light.

• To reduce your exposure to electromagnetic energy, wear a headset when using a cell phone, text instead of call, and keep your calls brief.

• Check your home periodically for radon exposure.

• Discuss with your health care providers the need for medical tests or procedures that involve radiation exposure. “Key considerations include personal history of radiation exposure, the expected benefit of the test, and alternative ways of obtaining the same information. In addition, to help limit cumulative medical radiation exposure, individuals can create a record of all imaging or nuclear medicine tests received and, if known, the estimated radiation dose for each test.”

• Become an active voice in your community. “[I]ndividuals have the power to affect public policy by letting policymakers know that they strongly support environmental cancer research and measures that will reduce or remove from the environment toxics that are known or suspected carcinogens or endocrine-disrupting chemicals. Individuals can also influence industry by selecting non-toxic products and, where these do not exist, communicating with manufacturers and trade organizations about their desire for safer products.”