The Secret History of the War on Cancer
Language: English
Pages: 560
ISBN: 0465015689
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
As epidemiologist Devra Davis shows in this superbly researched exposé, this is no accident. The War on Cancer has followed the commercial interests of industries that generated a host of cancer-causing materials and products. This is the gripping story of a major public health effort diverted and distorted for private gain that is being reclaimed through efforts to green health care and the environment.
cancer hazards against careful epidemiological studies of all workers in a plant, and about the paramount importance of impressing plant management with the seriousness of the problem. The standard protective and hygienic measures currently used in industry to combat industrial poisons and other health hazards are not always adequate for the control of occupational cancer. The following case history is a compelling illustration. Some thirty years ago workers in one of the newer metal industries
the field of occupational and environmental carcinogenesis. Kehoe, a pivotal figure in several major chemical firms, also laid the groundwork for this field and headed one of the first university laboratories dedicated to researching the industrial hazards of industrial toxicology and workplace epidemiology. His work established the basic rules that would guide analysis of worker health and safety for the first half of the twentieth century. Two people could not have had more fundamentally
proved less enduring. Measuring lead in the blood of all workers in the plant, Kehoe decided that background levels of lead were high in all workers, not just in those directly handling lead. Kehoe confidently declared that lead was a natural compound found in all humans—an essential micromineral.Years later, when scientists showed that people living on remote mountaintops in Nepal had no lead in their bodies at all, Kehoe’s earlier conclusions were understood as reflecting the fact that all the
the company’s silence, however, cases kept accumulating. In 1980 it became known that 364 cases of bladder cancer had occurred in this one factory since its beginning. Under a private contract between DuPont and the Kettering laboratories, Kehoe and his colleagues looked into the cancer-causing properties of synthetic dyes and coal tar contaminants of paraffin in workers and studied the response of lab rats to these same agents. One confidential agreement for research identified thirteen
men (like Endicott himself and nearly half of all physicians at the time) would never stop smoking. It would be better to devise a cigarette that was safe than to try to keep people from smoking altogether. At this point, revenues from tobacco advertising accounted for more than one in every four dollars spent in the booming business of shaping public opinion. Wynder, one of the most vocal Americans to warn of the dangers of tobacco, had all along urged that it made sense to try to design a