The Big Cancer Lie
Efron, Edith
Edith Efron THE BIG CANCER LIE Deceiving the public and corrupting science. The Apocalyptics: Politics, Science, and the Big Cancer Lie by Edith Efron is the fully documented revelation o...
...medium incidence was found in France, Switzerland, Singapore, India, and Chile...
...He served both as a spokesman for the HEW study and as chairman of the meeting...
...However, although its co s continue to be widely cited the cr rts of the argument for these conclusions h~ perhaps advisedly, never been publishe~ a scientific journal nor in any of the regular series of government publications...
...Among the most important compendia--the veritable bibles of international epidemiology--are several sets of studies...
...9 And as recently as 1980, the New York Times reported that a monstrous epidemic of occupational cancer was occurring, citing "the Federal Government's own estimates...
...The value is clearly political, and it is a value for both sides in this controversy...
...John Cairns, at the time the head of the Mill Hill Laboratory in London, had been particularly contemptuous_9 He had said of the document that "there were several parts of it which seem to be manifestly silly" and that anyone who could perform calculations "could see how stupid it is...
...medium incidence was found in West and East Africa, Japan, Singapore (Chinese), India, and Europe...
...Speaking of the review committee, Higginson wrote that "the group" had concluded that there were no presently known data "which would seriously challenge" the estimate of 6 percent for occupational cancers...
...In addition, sexual practices and reproductive habits had accounted for yet another proportion of the cancer rate, e.g., infection, possibly herpes, was hypothesized to be a risk factor for cervix cancer...
...On the subject of occupational cancer, the difference between U.S...
...To be consistent, Rail should have retitled "the OSHA paper": "Estimates of the Fraction of Cancer Which Is Due to an Interaction between Occupational, Dietary, Genetic and Hormonal Factors"--and put it in a shredder...
...And here is the second: Recognizing that carcinogenesis is a multiphased process whose progression is influenced by a number of factors, it makes little sense to assert that "only" 1 to 5 percent of cancers are attributable to a single factor...
...David Rail, who attended that seminar, also defended the study's estimates_9 Then another protest was heard...
...He conceded that the study had not been published in a scientific journal, said it was a record prepared for the OSHA hearings, and assured the attending scientists that it was "the intention of the group of people who have worked toward this document to now go back to it and try and work on it further to prepare it for publication in the scientific literature...
...John Berg observed that "the report reads as if we're going to suddenly see 14 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1984 this vast, drastic increase in the number of lung cancer deaths that are going to occur over the next 20 years" and that "there's no way to substantiate [it...
...It was now called "Estimates of the Fractions of Cancer in the United States Related to Occupational Factors...
...The Apocalyptics: Politics, Science, and the Big Cancer Lie by Edith Efron is the fully documented revelation o f one o f the most astonishing scientific scandals o f our time: the ideological corruption of the field o f cancer research in the United States...
...l0 THE AMERlCAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1984 The Garden of Eden/Post-World War II Theory of Environmental Cancer The first and oldest "axiom" is the apocalyptics' Garden of Eden theory of cancer which saturated the United States for two decades...
...Although Peto invested considerable effort in portraying himself as a neutral in the political controversies over environmental cancer, he was clearly angry...
...The famous 90 percent had been lifted from John Higginson's work and had been grafted onto the post-World War II industrial theory of cancer, to produce a nakedly political doctrine...
...Tobacco had been said to account for 30 to 40 percent of all cancers in males, by such scientists as Guy Newell of the NCI and Richard Doll in England...
...Lung cancer apart, there have been rises-but there have also been declines...
...edited by Richard Doll and assoq es...
...No one has taught the press that science does not operate by assertions, by leaks, by off-the-record briefings, by mimeograph machines spitting out documents with release dates geared to the evening news, or by documents with no names at all...
...From 1953 to 1955, John Higginson, then' in the Department of Pathology and Oncology at the University Of Kansas Medical Center, working conjointly with A.G...
...Their theory did not exclude the phenomenon of occupational cancer or d~:ug-induced cancer or radiation-induced cancer, since it was epidemiologists who had made those discoveries in man...
...OettM, conducted a far more complex study...
...that nature was virtually free of carcinogens...
...There is no such implication here...
...President, as well as many newspaper articles and much scientific iournalism...
...radiation for 1 percent...
...Indeed, as laymen, they have never realized how much "homework" there was to do...
...science of epidemiology...
...It named nine examples o f occupational carcinogens--asbestos, arsenic, benzene, coal tar pitch and coke oven emissions, vinyl chloride, chromium, iron oxide, nickel, and petroleum distillates--and said that the projections suggested that occupational cancers caused by those nine carcinogens alone might be anywhere from 20 to 38 percent or more of the total cancer incidence "in forthcoming decades...
...But Abelson's column contained a warning signal: Epidemiologists abroad wege also angry...
...i.e., were they "environmental...
...the causal "attributable to" had been changed to "related to...
...Since the 1960s, the central dogma of the apocalyptic scientists has been the prophecy that the modern industrial system will bring about the destruction o f life on earth, and that one of the major forms o f that destruction will be cancer...
...And it did not mean what "the NCI" said it meant...
...low incidence was found in North America, "most European From epidemiology, one learns why the cancer apocalypse, of necessity, arrived in America in the form of a fable...
...It was a global theory that embraced natural carcinogens as well as industrial carcinogens, and it had arrived on the scene with an extraordinarily dramatic estimate of the proportion of human cancer believed to be "environmental"--namely, John Higginson's 90 percent...
...their critics stubbornly challenged those extrapolations into the unknown with estimates based on the few data that are known...
...In 1980, other more formal reactions from abroad were heard...
...Its mythological status is most simply illustrated by the very subject of a particular cancer conference in Israel held in 1968...
...He apparently did not realize he was criticizing himself...
...Its listed "authors" were the National Cancer Institute and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences--which is to say that it had no authors...
...Too many foreign scientists participated in it and the ideological dimension of the war is too crude...
...they understood that meaning perfectly...
...As for industrial factors in cancer, they estimated that roughly 1 percent might be attributable to food additives, 2 percent tO pollution, around 1 percent to "industrial products," 1 percent to medicines and medical procedures--and 4 percent to occupation...
...and in a slightly different form, the same theory was taught in 1970 by an Ad Hoc Committee chaired by Umberto Saffiotti of the NCI to the U.S...
...Undoubtedly, some journalists have been ideologically receptive to the apocalyptic "axioms...
...A few corrections, however, could not erase the "misinterpretation...
...The "opportunists" in the three health agencies were not identified...
...They compared the rates of a whole range of cancers in the Bantu in Johannesburg with the rates of the same cancers in American blacks...
...soft-tissue cancers...
...cancer agencies and, always, bad or premature science was funneled directly into the press, as well as into the labor movement, before the scientific community--national and internati0nal--had a chance to exercise its normal process of challenge, confirmation, or refutation--a process that requires many years...
...By the time I had finished, I had reached the conclusion that to blame the press under the circumstances I discovered is absurd...
...The first rumor was never published, but it was widely repeated...
...The second response from abroad was austere and overtly nonpolitical-but given the source, it was a powerful counterattack...
...The story of one is told here in detail, however, because it caused an international scandal in the cancer world--a scandal which was kept secret from the American public...
...9 Cuyler Hammond, who, with Irving Selikoff, had done the most definitive studies on asbestos insulators--the workers w~th the highest exposures-professed himself "slightly puzzled" as to how the projections of 2,000,000 asbestos deaths had been made...
...Tobacco, and tobacco-interactingwith-alcohol, had been said by such scientists as Robert Flamant of INSERM in France to account for 50 percent of male cancers...
...An epidemic of frightful proportions...
...that Canadians had about 10 times as much breast cancer as did Japanese...
...The layman can probably do no better than to consider a question Kessler raised in 1979...
...By the early and mid-1960s, several World Health Organization committees had agreed that environmental factors accounted directly or indirectly for the majority of human cancers, and thus that the majority of cancers were theoretically preventable...
...He observed that the study used "rather tricky arithmetic...
...An illuminating interpretation of the battle of percentages is on the record...
...Calculations would indicate that in the United States approximately 80 percent of all malignant tumors are likely to be environmentally conditioned and thus theoretically preventable...
...This second apocalyptic "axiom" was disseminated by many sources...
...Written by Richard Doll of Oxford, yet another of the epidemiological fathers of environmental cancer, and Richard Peto of Oxford, it was an extraordinary review of the known data...
...with theories o f cancer causation and cancer prevention that are pure myth...
...for 30 percent...
...It is less important to know the identity of "anonymous" at the NCI than to know that major NCI scientists were disseminating such views, and it tells us clearly that journalists did not misunderstand the meaning of what they were being told...
...Those actions did not occur to the Director of NIEHS...
...Epidemiologists, like animal and bacterial extrapolators, are deeply politicized...
...that people in Mozambique had about 100 times as much liver cancer as did people in North America and Europe...
...and diet possibly combined with inflammation was also said to be associated with prostate cancer...
...That may be the real reason for which nonapocalyptic epidemiologists persist in making such estimates...
...The danger is in the temptation to extrapolate this methodology to areas where I think it is impossible, based on current knowledge, to quantitate...
...In the United Kingdom, he said, the Association of Scientific, Technical and Managerial Staffs (ASTMS) had released a~ document to its members which had appropriated the NCINIEHS-NIOSH figures and had converted them into British figures...
...One who did so was Irving Kessler...
...Speaking with statesmanlike sorrow, Norton Nelson o f NYU said he was " d e e p l y concerned" that " a statement which is going to fall apart and cannot be adequately supported" would "damage the enterprise which so many of us are concerned with...
...Cancer Mortality f o r Selected _..es in 24 Countries, edited by Mitsui Segi and associates...
...Nutritional factors had been said by such scientists as Ernst Wynder of the American Health Foundation and Paul Newberne of The famous 90 percent had been lifted from John Higginson's work and had been grafted onto the post-World War II industrial theory of cancer, to produce a nakedly political document...
...Where these non-authors had come from, and why their names had not been ori the "draft-summary" four days earlier, was not explained...
...A striking series of discoveries about cancer in the preindustrial world had decisively damaged those " o l d beliefs...
...There had been an important byproduct of this scrupulous global search: The epidemiologists had destroyed the rational possibility of any kind of simple-minded reductionism in the analysis of the causes of human cancer...
...These compilations include not only incidence and mortality data, but an enormous amount of technical materials on the biological characteristics of the different types of cancers found all over the world...
...and 3) that an epidemic of industrially caused cancer is raging in ~ e United States, with factory workers as the primary victims...
...Those who believed the post-World War II synthetic/industrial theory of environmental cancer also believed, necessarily, that the cancer rates would shortly explode...
...Announcements of great cancer epidemics emerged from a great many sources of which the most influential, once again, was the federal government...
...On the same day that this "draft summary" was released to the press, on September 11, 1978, Joseph Califano, Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, funneled that 2,000,000 figure into the world of organized labor...
...Equally curiously, no one asked Saffiotti for an explanation of those "curious circumstances...
...Attempts were eventually made to correct this falsification of history...
...Shabad in th e USSR and by scientists in the NCI itself...
...low incidence was found in North America, Europe, Jamaica, South America, and India...
...congenital for 2 percent...
...genitourinary, including cancers of the testis, penis, uterus, and breast...
...The cancers examined were gastrointestinal, including the esophagus and the liver...
...Third, he said, the use of percentages was being politicized and was creating "inflated expectations" in Congress and the public...
...They repeated the basic charge that the risks for all workers, whatever their exposure and however long it had been, had been established by criteria derived from the relatively few who had been most heavily exposed for many years, and they said: "This disregard of both dose and duration of exposure is indefensible and produces risk estimates which are more than 10 times too large...
...medium incidence was found in Japan, Singapore (Chinese), Nigeria, and Uganda...
...What one learns from the first criticism is that Rail is unselfconsciously critical of epidemiologists who "only" base their analyses on knowledge...
...agencies who, he said, had actually produced the data he was damning...
...As a former media critic, I was particularly interested in determining whether the press reports were accurate...
...It could not have emerged from fact...
...health agencies...
...One contributor, David Rall, head of the NIEHS, dismissed the critique with an ad hominem attack...
...After an intensive study o f the first decade o f cancer prevention in this country, it is Efron's conclusion that the antireason, anti-science, and antitechnology trends in the New Left and counterculture movements o f the 1960s--the " "apocalyptics"--have distorted research into environmental cancer and have saturated the U.S...
...When one goes to the epidemiological literature, however, one learns that the theory was false for enbreaking them down into highincidence areas, medium-incidence areas, and low-incidence areas...
...Their environmental theory did not exclude the industrial-chemical theory of cancer...
...The enormous body of literature on human cancer in preindustrial nations, he said, had altered the prevailing understanding of the disease...
...Certainly they have no predictive value...
...The full explanation of that 90 percent had also been in existence for many years...
...It was a paper called "Proportion of Cancer Due to Occupation," published in Preventive Medicine...
...Finally, in 1981, the most detailed attack of all appeared in print...
...9 In 1977, journalist Larry Agran's The Cancer Connection was published by St...
...Rothman used--an "illogical deduction"--and I think that this illogical deduction has been put forth by some in the area of occupation, and by virtually all in the area of diet...
...They estimated that 30 percent of U.S...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1984 17...
...they cover the daily news.' They could not take off several years to do their "homework...
...In October 1978, OSHA held a "seminar" for the press on occupational disease and repeated the data in the study...
...Here are some of the examples he gave: _9 High incidence of esophageal cancer was found in Japan, China, southern Africa, Jamaica, Iran, southern USSR, and the Caribbean area...
...Many of the "cherished beliefs" about cancer, he said, now required "drastic revision...
...9 In 1975, Senator John Tunney opened a hearing on the Toxic Substances Control Act with the warning that U.S...
...Emphasis added] The analysis of the HEW study, said Maugh, "necessitates the conclusion that its predictions are invalid...
...This was the seminal study that suggested for the first time thaiL cancer in an entire population could be a function of geography, of place--of the environment...
...He observed that "the only guess I can make is that we're going to see an increase for a short time in the number of asbestos related deaths and then a decline...
...cancer rates were rising at a fearful rate, and said: " I t is clear from the National Cancer Institute studies that cancer is, indeed, a byproduct of an industrialized society...
...The American press covers daily events, and does not see past the policymakers...
...Those estimates, he reported, had now penetrated the international labor organization in Geneva and a labor organization in the United Kingdom...
...Not only did it predict the unheard-of number of 2,000,000 asbestos deaths, but it clashed violently with all prior estimates that had been made of the fraction of cancer that could be attributed to occupation...
...medium incidence was found in "most European countries," Canada, and the Caribbean area...
...No one has taught the press that the very appearance of such phenomena means that what one is hearing is not science...
...Throughout the preceding decade, that fraction had been consistently estimated to be small by some of the most famous cancer scientists in the world--e.g., Johannes Clemmesen of Denmark, Richard Doll of Britain, and John Higginson of the IARC, all of them fathers of the theory of environmental cancer...
...Past exposure to asbestos, said this authorless document, "is expected to result in over 2 million premature cancer deaths in the next three decades" or "roughly 17 percent of the total cancer incidence experienced in that period...
...some scientists, as we know, have built their careers upon that "axiom...
...9 High incidence of stomach cancer was found in Japan, Chile, Iceland~ Colombia, Finland, Newfoundland, and the USSR...
...Two of Rail's criticisms of scientists who have made low estimates of occupational cancer are worth noting...
...The estimates, they said, "were so grossly in error that no arguments based even loosely on them should be taken seriously...
...He was worried, he said, that the low estimates of occupational cancer were being made without sufficient data...
...In this paper, Higginson estimated the probable upper limit of occupational cancers, putting it at 6 percent...
...health agencies...
...and a group of international committee reports published by the World Health Organization...
...Above all, it is the inadequacy of the thousands of cancer scientists who have been fully aware that this country has been fed politically corrupt science but have remained silent in the face of the cultural malpractice of their colleagues--perhaps out of selfinterest, bpt unquestionably out of fear and helplessness...
...This raised an urgent question: Did these patches represent some hereditary tendency in certain groups of people to develop certain types of cancer, or were they regional outbreaks caused or influenced by external factors...
...In 1978, when Elizabeth Miller delivered her presidential address to the American Association of Cancer Research, she took pains to explain the origin of the famous 90 percent and attributed it to John Higginson...
...they had collected every bit of information they could find about human cancer rates and had excluded nothing...
...For good measure, he attacked Samuel Epstein, whose book The Politics of Cancer was a popular transmission belt for the HEW's occupational epidemic and had become the bible of the English-speaking labor unions...
...and to write just the chapter from which these excerpts are taken, I had to read two histories of cancer epidemiology, several epidemiology textbooks, and some 5,000 additional papers in that field...
...It first appeared in the form of a mimeographed paper, a "draft summary" with a release date for the press, entitled "Estimates of the Fraction of Cancer Incidence in the United States Attributable to Occupational Factors...
...It had been dedicated to a detailed examination of the problem of cancer in the preindustrial world...
...He conducted a comparative study of primary liver cancer in the Bantu population of South Africa and in the blacks of the United States...
...The "distinguished names," including those of the two agency heads, were still publicly protected, as were their American critics...
...Reporters must write swiftly...
...That was the kind of information which had long since shattered the "cherished beliefs" that cancer was "predominantly" a disease of advanced industrialization and that cancers were "necessarily" industrial in type...
...To write my book, I had to read about 10,000 papers in carcinogenesis and genetics and about 500 books...
...Only one " ' c o n t r i b u t o r " was present--Umberto Saffiotti of the NCI, who was not an epidemiologist...
...According to Efron, the principal methods o f convincing Americans o f the inevitable cancer apocalypse have been to ignore data and theory which contradict the prophecy, namely to ignore the existence o f non-industrial carcinogens and non-industrial causes o f cancer-and to generate baseless data and theory to support the prophecy...
...In the 1960 paper reporting on these extraordinary disparities, Higginson concluded that almost none of this large range of cancers were hereditary, that most were "environmental"--a concept which clearly and explicitly included the concepts of natural factors and cultural patterns...
...In the sections below, which are excerpts from the Epilogue o f her book, Efron investigates three o f the mythic "'axioms" o f the cancer apocalypse-false or baseless ideas which, by the 1970s, had convinced the press, Congress, and millions o f citizens that _9 1984 by Edith Efron...
...Indians who had moved to Fiji and Natal...
...But perhaps more important, that committee also included Johannes Clemmesen of Denmark's Institute for Cancer Epidemiology, the first historian of ertvironmental cancer and possibly the most august father of the theory of environmental cancer...
...that man is the only species which creates carcinogens...
...88 percent, he estimated, was due to "other life style factors...
...Over the years, studies of migrants changing their cancer patterns from those of the mother country to those of the new country--Japanese who had moved to America...
...They knew that cancer rates had risen precipitately in those nations where a variety of factors, including plumbing, an abundant food supply, and control of infectious diseases, had increased the human life span...
...He criticized the scientists from the NCI, NIEHS, and NIOSH who, he said, had given Califano the "alarmist" estimates of cancer deaths used in Califano's speech...
...The implications of this single study were staggering, and, clearly, the question required more extensive investigation...
...According to the transcript, not one scientist even hinted that he was criticizing a political phenomenon, and not one expressed concern that the country had been aggressively misinformed or that the labor movement had been gratuitously terrorized_9 The only effect of the study which was deplored at the meeting was the possibility of harm to the scientific community itself...
...and that the range of stomach cancer in high-incidence countries-Japan, Iceland, and Chile--varied from about 27 to 45 times as much as that in the low-incidence countries-Uganda, Mozambique, and the United States...
...what ~is more, they had discovered that there was great inconsistency among the industrial nations themselves...
...A sudden sharp rise in the cancer rates in the middle and late 1970s would prove that the post-World War II industrial theory was true...
...The tendency is to extrapolate to the areas where the science is infinitely soft at this time . . . . This temptation to extrapolate into soft areas leads to the term Dr...
...Those cherished beliefs were, quite simply, false...
...The implications of the NCI-NIEHS-NIOSH study--henceforth to be called the HEW study--were stunning to many epidemiologists...
...There was a striking contrast between Peto's assault on Epstein--a private citizen whose work is read by choice--and his courtesy to the "reasonable" scientists at the head of U.S...
...In the face of the "array of percentages," he counseled "caution" and said the following: I have no problem measuring the excess cancers among cigarette smokers because it can be done--it can be done with quantitation . . . . . I am very confident that the figure of 35 percent or so of all cancers in men is related to cigarette smoking...
...And the period in which the occupational catastrophe was to take place had become extraordinarily vague...
...The great occupational cancer epidemic, then, ended in an appalling international scandal, and in a shame, anger, and bitterness which is only expressed behind the scenes...
...The study was strange in one other respect...
...some may have enjoyed the excitement of a new kind of war between Good and Evil...
...When one examines these various reports, one discovers three dominant ideas: 1) that most carcinogens are unnatural'synthetic substances...
...They include the seminal series of volum led Cancer Incidence in Five ( nts...
...Doll and Peto also declared that despite the overlaps and uncertainties, one could make certain estimates of the proportions of cancer that are attributable to various environmental factors...
...Indeed, within the United States itself~ one found some of the highest incidence rates in the world of THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1984 II certain types of cancer (e.g., colon) and some of the lowest in the world (e.g., stomach and liver...
...It was from this vast body of data collected over decades that Higginson had plucked his examples...
...A transcript was made of the ensuing discussion, and here are some of the scientists' criticisms--criticisms which were never transmitted to the public: "Peter Greenwald, an epidemiologist in the New York State Health Department, observed politely that "there are no authors, there is a list of nine contributors in alphabetical order but there is not one that really takes the credit for it," and said he had hoped for an explanation of this phenomenon...
...Martin's Press, in which he attributed the man-made "up to 90 percent" to the NCI, and wrote: "In truth, what we are witnessing is the unmistakable emergence of a national cancer epidemic...
...In short, the HEW projections are clearly exaggerated...
...Senior scientists do not attack senior scientists where laymen can hear them...
...And they had destroyed that rational possibility before Wilhelm Hueper of the NCI and his intellectual heirs had told one of the most advanced industrial civilizations on earth their fairy tale...
...Finally, he noted that percentages tended to be equated with money, specifically with shares of the NCI b u d g e t . Whether the sole purpose of the war of percentages has been to "create inflated expectations" and to reallocate the NCI research budget may be doubted...
...He observed that it was prepared by "a working group of nine well known scientists, including Arthur Upton and David RaU," both of whom, he said, "still seem more ready to defend than repudiate i t . " The study, he said, showed how " a group of reasonable men can collectively generate an unreasonable r e p o r t . " And he challenged the fallacious estimates in It was a remarkable case of killing the messenger who had brought the bad news, probably attributable to the fact that Nature is a publication that is also read by laymen...
...He should then have walked to the nearest blackboard and written a hundred times: "People who live in glass houses should not throw stones...
...Kennaway, who i . . . . . . L.n.~ been the first scientist to synthe~ a pure chemical carcinogen in the laooratory, realized that the forcible transplantation of huge and that the problem in African blacks "may be due to some extrinsic factor which should be studied...
...This third "axiom" of the apocalyptics--the monstrous epidemic that must infallibly follow from the assumption that 90 percent of cancer is caused by post-World War II organic chemistry--has not occurred...
...If this "holistic" description of cancer is true, then no scientific analysis of the causal factors of environmental cancer was possible or will ever be possible...
...All emerged from the U.S...
...one can find these data in any good medical library...
...Three were particularly noteworthy...
...The epidemiologists had discovered that when they mapped the extraordinary variations in cancer rates all over the globe, they were looking at a phenomenon that resembled patches of epidemic disease...
...These three ideas were the fundamental "axioms" of the cancer apocalyptics in the United States, and according to most of the above informants they had surged out of the National Cancer Institute and "the federal government," Since these various ideas had presumably emerged from the study of cancer in human beings--from the science of epidemiology--I investigated the literature of that science to discover exactly what epidemiologists had reported on those subjects...
...A Great Cancer Epidemic Is Arriving/Will Arrive These two "axioms" bred yet another...
...Here are some of the discoverie~ I made about three of those "axioms...
...One learns from the second criticism that Rail had actually ended up by denying the validity of "the OSHA paper" itself...
...He found that while the Bantu suffered from extraordinary high rates of that cancer, the American blacks did not...
...They had ruled out nothing, and had collected all the information they could find about every type of cancer in every type of country, society, and region...
...All scientists were critical, some were caustic, and some were depressed...
...Thus was the modern theory of environmental cancer actually born...
...In that study, written for the eyes of the world's scientists, the courtesy extended by Peto to American government scientists was abandoned...
...We may also assume, however, that they had not cared to read the literature of their field...
...The committee included some prominent American scientists: Lawrence Garfinkel of the ACS, David Schottenfield of the Epidemiology Department of Sloane Memorial Hospital, and John C. Bailar of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute...
...The document, he said, was "open to severe criticisms...
...9 High incidence of liver cancer (in males) was found in Mozambique and southern Africa...
...And in another much more extensive 1968 paper, Higginson estimated that 90 percent of all cancers were theoretically preventable...
...and unknown for 15 percent...
...In fact, the only value of having percentage estimates of industrially linked cancers based on confirmed human carcinogens is that it serves as a brake on the unbridled fantasies of apocalyptic scientists...
...low incidence was found in the United Kingdom, in whites of the U.S., and in New Zealand, and in Israel it was "very rare...
...Higginson had also informed the audience at the 1968 conference that Singapore Chinese got about 20 times as much nasopharyngeal cancer as did people in "most couotries...
...Since it has been published in book form, the interested reader can consult it for technical details...
...Up to 90 percent are caused by contaminants placed in the environment by man...
...When Higginson, at that 1968 conference in Israel, sought to describe the global epidemiological discoveries that had been piling up since the late 1930s, he did so by means of a sampling of the data...
...At the same conference, Philippe Shubik, a prominent basic scientist, observed that the HEW study had been thoroughly discredited and informed the audience that several of the "contributors" had been invited to attend that meeting to explain their work but had failed to respond to the invitations_9 He did not name the "contributors...
...It was a conference which never could have existed if the post-World War II synthetic theory were true...
...It is common in a polarized controversy to assume that if one side takes a fallacy-ridden position, the other side is right...
...Furthermore any suggestions which derive directly or indirectly from it that 20, 23, 38 or 40 percent of cancer deaths are, or will be, due to occupational factors should be dismissed...
...His criticism cited above actually means that there is no way to differentiate analytically among any of the major determinants of human cancer...
...From epidemiology, one learns why the cancer apocalypse, of necessity, arrived in America in the form of a fable...
...The names of a "review committee"--scientists who had reviewed and approved the published manuscriptmappeared at the head of the article...
...The 40-percent-or-more estimate also clashed with estimates commonly made of the proportion of cancer associated with other factors...
...It has been nourished on bad science since the inception of the cancer prevention program...
...It would be consistent with our present knowledge to assert that all cancers are associated in one way or another with occupational factors, just are they are prob16 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1984 ably all associated with dietary factors, with genetic factors, and with hormonal factors...
...2) that as much as 90 percent of cancer is caused by industrial chemicals...
...Abelson denounced the "opportunists" and publicity seekers who were alleging the existence of a cancer epidemic caused by chemicals...
...He also informed the readers of Science that the NCI-NIEHSNIOSH report had been widely condemned by epidemiologists, that Richard Dqll of Oxford had called it "scientific nonsense," and that the British journal Lancet had deplored the appearance of so inadequate a study "under such distinguished names...
...In 1978, a great workers' epidemic was announced...
...the precise "three decades" was absent...
...I originally investigated these mysterious "axioms" (and a great many other misrepresentations which are not discussed in this excerpt) in order to assess the responsibility of the press in transmitting them...
...It is obvious, however, that some scientists at the NCI were espousing a similar concept...
...It was a global concept derived from the varying rates of cancers all over the world, and the concept encompassed the least industrialized as well as the most industrialized nations on earth...
...9 In 1975, Time magazine in an article called "The Disease of the Century" quoted an NCI scientist directly: "Says the NCI's Dr...
...Four days after the official media brainwashing, Philip Abelson, the editor of Science, attacked the study in an editorial...
...One scientist, the story went, had sought to remove his name from the study, but had been threatened by the head of one agency that if he did so, his career in cancer research would end...
...and by the mid and late 1970s, it had been reported by laboratory testers that every conceivable aspect of the planet Earth was teeming with natural carcinogens...
...government scientists and their critics is that the U.S...
...that Denmark and the United States had as much as 7 or 8 times as much rectum cancer as did Japanese and Colombians...
...hope that this [meeting] at leastwill stimulate those whose names are listed in this document and many others to try and face the issue with facts, with d a t a . . . Saffiotti did not explain what "curious circumstances" had led a document without authors, "facts," and " d a t a " to be funneled through the mouth of the Secretary of HEW to the American labor unions and directly into the press without peer review...
...It was trained, as one trains a circus dog, to view apocalyptics in and out Of government as fountainheads of scientific truth...
...it was, he said, "what might be expected of industry...
...Given the latency period of cancer, which might be five to thirty years or more, the logic was impeccable...
...Europeans who had moved to North America, Australia, and to the tropics--repeatedly reinforced the discovery that cancer patterns in man shifted with geography and culture...
...and one year later, Lesley Stahl of CBS reported that the American cancer rates were "soaring...
...this time the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) had retroactively joined the NCI and the NIEHS as authors...
...cancer was associated with tobacco, 35 percent with nutritional factors, 3 percent with alcohol, 7 percent with reproductive and sexual behavior, 3 percent with "geophysical factors," i.e., UV radiation, and possibly 10 percent with infection...
...Speaking at the International Conference on Chemical Toxicology in Munich, he supported the British Royal Society's estimate that only one percent of all cancers were of occupational origin...
...It had never been published in a scientific journal or reviewed by other scientists...
...Another was the extrapolation that "17 percent of all cancer deaths in the THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1984 13 United States each year will be associated with previous exposure to asbestos...
...Their names were listed in "alphabetical order"--a point explicitly made on the first page of the paper itself...
...The asbestos death rates previously projected had been disastrous enough-approximatelY 2,000 lung cancer deaths were then being recorded among asbestos insulators, most oj c whom had al~o been heavy smokers...
...They recorded the cancer rates of man who lived in jungles and of man who lived in skyscrapers...
...health agencies had been charged with fabricating a politically motivated document and with using the devices of"'confidence men...
...Although the HEW study was enveloped in scandal from the moment of its appearance, the general public did not know it...
...We have no way of knowing who Anonymous is unless reporters decide to tell us...
...tirely different reasons as well...
...For those who are too young to remember and for those who may have forgotten, here are some examples of the announcements which flooded the country: _9 In 1975' the Washington Post, reporting on research being conducted at the National Cancer Institute, said that that agency was "producing mounting evidence that environmental impurities in man's habitat are the primary causes of most cancer...
...The HEW study was treated with withering scorn and language was used of a type that had never before been publicly directed at the U.S...
...He was quite aware, he said, of the problem of the promotion of one carcinogen by another and of the multifactorial nature of cancer, but rough estimates based on known data, he said, could b e made...
...In this analysis, prepared for the int e r n a t i o n a l world o f cancer epidemiology, the U.S...
...That, he said, made the use of percentages questionable...
...He considered the public release of the unreviewed study "a tragic mistake...
...tobacco/alcohol for 5 percent...
...He was particularly scornful of the HEW study: I'm very much concerned by the political implications of enunciating cancer risks based on speculation, with pitifully little empirical evidence...
...Those who criticized the document publicly were rare indeed...
...9 _9 _9 One conclusion becomes evident from this examination of three of the "axioms" of the cancer apocalypse...
...Finally, within four days, the study had suddenly acquired a stellar list of "contributors...
...Again, to understand the significance of that 90 percent, one must know how the calculations had been made...
...90 Percent of Cancer Comes From Industrial Chemicals The second "axiom" of the cancer apocalypse was the famous report attributed by journalists and politicians to anonymous sources at the "National Cancer Institute" in the middle and late 1970s that as much as 90 percent of cancer was "environment a l " - - a n d by "environmental" the anonymous informant(s) meant the "man-made" or industrial environment...
...We owe the almost universal belief that a great epidemic has already arrived to a few intensely political men in the government's health agencies...
...The rumors, however, revealed that there was a widespread perception of the cancer prevention establishment as a political institution which used intellectual intimidation to achieve its goals...
...and it included Takeshi Hirayama of the Japanese National Cancer Center Research Institute, one of Japan's most prominent epidemiologists...
...It's comical...
...This was "environmental cancer," as discovered and defined by epidemiologists...
...The title had changed somewhat...
...Both are recorded in OSHA's policy document of 1980...
...I n fact, the HEW study caused an explosion...
...Surgeon General and to Congress, with Barry Commoner devoting himself to the popularization of that theory throughout the 1970s...
...e John Weisburger, disturbed by the exposure data, observed that "this document, if it ever sees the light of day, should be reassessed very critically and the numbers involved carefully inspected...
...Since, in fact, epidemiological studies of occupational cancer have barely begun, since the dietary theory of cancer is highly suggestive but unproved, and since no firm causal explanations have yet emerged for most of the major cancers in the United States, let alone for most of the minor cancers, one suspects that this entire battle could have been avoided if all of its participants had been willing to say: " I don't know...
...It had simply rolled off a gt~vernment mimeograph machine right into the labor movement after being "publicized" by Califano--the word "publicized" used unselfconsciously by the Chief of OSHA's Media News Service in letters written to inquiring citizens...
...He cited " a new study by scientists at the National Cancer Institute and t h e National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences" which was scheduled to be delivered to OSHA later that week, and presented a selection of its data...
...In fact, the challenge of those prior estimates was the stated intention of the paper...
...The resultant estimates of occupational deaths, he said, were "utterly without foundation," although they were now being quoted repeatedly in the lay and scientific press...
...leukemia...
...It generated a series of explosive rumors, and the rumors themselves shed considerable light on the mysterious mutism about the political nature of the document...
...It was written by one of the fathers of the theory of environmental cancer: John Higginson of the Saffiotti did not explain what "curious circumstance" had led a document without authors, "facts," and "data" to be funneled through the mouth of the Secretary of HEW to the American labor unions and directly into the press without peer review...
...government scientists, with little human data and with the aid of crude logical fallacies, extrapolated a catastrophic epidemic into the unknown...
...Among those he named were "the old belief that cancer is predominantly a disease of economically advanced countries...
...That political doctrine had saturated the entire country...
...One was an estimate that "5 million American men and women.., breathe significant amounts of asbestos fibers each day...
...sunlight for l0 percent...
...The book contains explosive information about scientific misrepresentation, manipulation o f the press, and scandals on the highest levels o f federal health agencies...
...Apart fror~ cancer in children, where "the frequency is not significantly different from that observed in the United States," thee rates of each one of this array of cancer types were strikingly different in the Bantu and the American blacks...
...That ignorance was exploited by certain advocates of the study...
...The single most shocking extrapolation was that of asbestos deaths...
...In 1979, John Higginson himself granted interviews to Science and to the Washington Post in which he explained that his theory of environmental cancer had been misinterpreted by the "ecologists," the "chemical carcinogenesis people," and the "occupational people," and bluntly described the erroneous beliefs about environmental cancer that were coursing through this society as "societal, political and quasi-scientific dogmas...
...The first was a paper in Nature headlined "Distorting the Epidemiology of Cancer," signed by Richard Peto of Oxford...
...that union was now asserting that "20 to 40 percent of current United Kingdom cancer deaths are caused by occupational carcinogens...
...The " d r a f t summary" had simply metamorphosed into an imposing study adorned with the names of some of the most important scientists in America's health agencies...
...A far more dramatic variant of that rumor appeared in print...
...it was " a strong term," he said--and then tie did his best, once again, to convert a disaster into a source of inspiration: And this I emphasize again is just an early stage of this analysis and because of curious circumstances became much more of a public document than it was originally planned to be...
...In fact, at that same 1968 cancer conference in Israel, John Higginson had reported the following conclusion about the United States: While we do not know the etiological factors for many cancers, we are in a position to estimate on theoretical grounds the proportion of all cancers which may be of environmental origin...
...Throughout the very decades in which Americans were being taught that carcinogens were unnatural substances, there was a rapidly growing body of experimental literature reporting on natural carcinogens--but that literature sat mutely in the medical libraries, unread or ignored by the scientists who were educating Americans...
...Others spoke at this meeting, but these comments convey its tone...
...I n September 1979, Professor Rene Truhaut of the University of Paris denounced the HEW study as a "scandale...
...In strictly scientific terms, the government study was murdered at this private meeting, but it was a singularly bloodless murder, for the critics were mute about _9 the obvious political dimension of that study...
...He described the incidence of eleven types of cancer which appeared all over the world, countries," and Israel...
...By the mid and late 1970s, the national press and some politicians were reporting unusually frightening news about environmental cancer--news said to be based on scientific discoveries made at the U.S...
...Significantly, Abelson mentioned only the names of a lay administrator and of foreign critics...
...Thomas Maugh of S c i e n c e analyzed both the HE ~ ' and the industrial critique and ~d that "the AIHC report appears to nonstrate some rather serious erro] t the HEW report...
...medical for 1 percent...
...In 1974, Levin, Devesa, Godwin, and Silverman of the NCI's Biometry Branch, then headed by Haenszel, yet another father of the theory of environmental cancer, had said of occupational cancer: " . . . only a small proportion of the population are directly exposed and these exposures can often be controlled or eliminated when the hazard is recognized," Commonly, the occupational proportion of the total cancer burden had been estimated at l to 5 percent and occasionally had risen to MIT to account for 30 percent of all cancers in men and possibly more in women...
...The new estimate of 40 percent or more made by the famous non-authors at three health agencies was staggeringly higher...
...He asked: "What would be the value of knowing what percentage of cancers are due to unidentifiable unspecified factors...
...low pregnancy rates have been correlated with high breast cancer rates...
...Some of the most eminent epidemiologists in America, joined by molecular biologist John Cairns, descended on the NCI to query the "contributors...
...Another was "the impression that environmental causes of human cancer are necessarily industrial in type...
...But one cannot--I cannot--indict the lay press for failing to understand what it takes years to understand...
...He warned that epidemiology would never become an important medical discipline " i f it degenerates into mindless statistical manipulation...
...In some cases, the Bantu had much more of a certain type of cancer than American blacks...
...Accordingly, they had not selected data to conform to any prior beliefs...
...One of the reasons for which it was unfathomably complex pertained to the scrupulous mental processes of the leading epidemiologists of the world, who had launched this quest for the understanding of human cancer...
...Unless they are, with proper attribution of responsible authorship, we would suggest that the OSHA paper should n o t be regarded as a serious contribution to scientific thought and should not be cited or used as if it were...
...And in the con12 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1984 clusion of that paper, he wrote these words: If a cancer incidence is calculated for a hypothetical population using the lowest rate available from the American or Bantu figures, it would appear probable that in Western communities at least two-thirds of all cancers (.excluding skin) are environmental in origin and therefore hypothetically preventable...
...all epidemiologists knew that some human cancer had indeed come from industrial chemicals, since it was epidemiologists who had made those discoveries in man...
...That 90 percent estimate, so cherished by the apocalyptics, did emerge from science--but it emerged from the numbers of blacks to the Americas had created a natural experiment that could be used to examine the question of heredity versus environment as it pertained to cancer...
...The inadequacy of the coverage is the inadequacy of the informants...
...It was altogether a most unusual way to inform America and the world that six occupational carcinogens were going to cause as much as 38 to 40 percent or more of the cancer in the United States--and unquestionably, according to this 10 or 15 percent...
...all are perfectly well aware of the practical implications of their various estimates, and all are perfectly aware that what they are fighting over is t h e body o f industrial civilization...
...Although a specific percentage was not universally accepted, the revolutionary idea that "most" cancers are environmental, thus theoretically preventable, had traveled swiftly throughout the world of cancer epidemiology...
...9 High incidence of cervix cancer (in females) was found in Colombia, Puerto Rico, Southern Africa, Jamaica, and among the nonwhite population of the U.S...
...But Newell's explanation of the invalidity of "extrapolating into soft areas" is informative--and it applies to both sides in the controversy...
...Between 1962 and 1969, Segi, Kurihara, and others had studied cancer mortality in forty-eight countries and fifteen Soviet Republics...
...The number of occupational carcinogens which were expected to produce as much as 38 percent of American cancer had abruptly shrunk...
...low incidence was found in Africa, the U.S., and India...
...That "axiom" which emerged from the sciences of toxicology and carcinogenesis held that all cancers were caused by carcinogens...
...Califano, a credulous political layman, electrified an AFLCIO national conference on occupational safety and health with "alarming facts" taken from the authorless study...
...This is how Higginson arrived at his progressive estimates of 65, 80, and, finally, 90 percent...
...That, however, was the interpretation of the 90 percent transmitted to the American public...
...and that most carcinogens are artifacts produced "in the test tubes of post-World War II organic chemists...
...The political dimension of the study about which scientists had been abnormally mute when an NCI tape-recorder was running was the dominant content of the rumors_9 Generally, the response of American epidemiologists to this astonishing study was secretive gossip...
...And precisely because they had ruled out nothing, their resulting data conformed to no preexisting "cherished beliefs" about ~the nature of cancer and was chaotically complex...
...Within a few days of the appearance of the altered and embellished HEW study, academics, too, moved to protest it...
...in others, much less--and it was evident that cultural practices were relevant to some of the differences, e.g., circumcision, sexual and reproductive customs, and diet...
...Others, too, shared this statesmanlike sorrow, but it extended neither to the political purposes Of the study nor to the damaged polity_9 News of the condemnation of the study sped like lightning from that closed conference throughout the scientific community...
...In sum, the epidemiological fathers of the environmental theory of cancer had stood by, explained, and justified their low estimates of occupational cancer, which had been the target of "the OSHA p a p e r . " The principal defender of that "paper" has been David Rall...
...At the end of a 1980 conference on cancer prevention, Guy Newell of the NCI made four interesting observations of which the layman should be aware...
...Those ideas which, according to Berenblum, required "drastic revision" were precisely the ideas that were coursing feverishly through the arteries of the American culture at that very time...
...diet, sexual behavior, etc...
...no scientist on the payroll of a federal agency publicly repudiated the study...
...Clearly, if the new estimate that 40 percent or more of all cancer was linked to factory exposures was accepted, the other factors would have to shrink in significance...
...The epidemiologists' theory of environmental cancer had been derived from studies of the preindustrial as well as the industrial nations, and that global theory had never equated "environmental" with " s y n t h e t i c chemicals" or with " i n d u s t r i a l chemicals," which is to say that the 90 percent had never been restricted to the "man-made...
...some detail, again identifying the most commonly observed fallacy--that of applying the risk calculations derived from the highest exposures to people who had not experienced those exposures...
...I discuss that idea in great detail in a different section of my book which is devoted to carcinogens and animal tests, but I sum it up rapidly here...
...They finally declared: It seems likely that whoever wrote the OSHA paper (it has a list of contributors, but no listed authors) did so for political rather than for scientific purposes, "and it will undoubtedly continue in the future as in the past to be used for political purposes by those who wish to emphasize the importance of occupational factors, including the Toxic Substances Strategy Committee in their 1980 report to the U.S...
...But "industry" was not alone in its shock...
...By the 1960s, "environmental cancer," as discovered by the epidemiologists, was an unfathomably complex phenomenon...
...An associate of Richard Doll who had attended the first private protest meeting at the NCI, Peto discussed the political as well as the scientific THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1984 15 aspects of the study...
...Nor did their theory exclude the fact that industrialized nations (e.g., America) tended in the aggregate to have much more cancer than did preindustrialized nations (e.g., Thailand), or that Americans rarely died of infectious diseases and tended to live until their seventies while (as late as 1974) the Thais were being decimated by infectious diseases and their median age was sixteen, approximately the life span of a cherished American house cat...
...He criticized Califano's "absurd" 1978 speech to labor union leaders, and discussed the "curious but extremely influential document which has been circulated privately for the past year or more...
...His estimates o f the p r o p o r t i o n a l significance of various environmental factors were based on data from the highly industrialized city of Birmingham in the United Kingdom: Tobacco, he said, might account for 30 percent of male cancers...
...Newell's second observation pertained to the fact that a given cancer might have more than one cause (e.g., both asbestos and tobacco cause lung cancer) and that causes could interact (as they do in the case of asbestos and tobacco...
...The first serious attempt to answer the question had been made twenty-four years before Higginson's lecture in Israel--in 1944, by Sir Ernes" vo--away, one of Britain's most Lt scientists...
...Of one particular estimate pertaining to nickel exposure, they wrote: "This calculation however might fairly be described as a confidence trick...
...Four days later, on September 15, 1978, a more detailed version of the same paper, this time thirty-nine pages long with an eleven-page appendix, was released to the press and the scientific community...
...At a toxicology conference, he expressed his conviction that information about occupational cancer would come only from serious epidemiological studies of human beings, not from analyses of old death certificates or from feeding rodents massive doses of chemicals...
...The scientific institutions which were said to have prepared the study had suddenly proliferated...
...Some years later, after Higginson had become a founding director of the International Agency for Research in Cancer (IARC), C.S...
...The role played by Saffiotti as spokesman for the study was particularly revealing...
...In fact, there was no genuine revolt at all...
...study, the percentage was far higher than 40 percent, since a list of other industrial carcinogens, which had not been included in the calculations, had been appended...
...He i~formed the American labor movement that occupational hazards were "constantly growing" and linked them immediately to synthetic chemicals: "In the chemical industry alone, production has skyrocketed from 1 billion pounds of synthetic organic chemicals in 1940 to more than 300 billion pounds last year, many of them new and untested substances...
...In addition, the occupational fraction of cancei" had been described as small by L.M...
...The future intention to prepare a scientific document was a concession that the document was not scientific, and was ignored_9 Throughout the barrage of criticism, Saffiotti was silent, but one comment, not previously quoted here, affected him strongly...
...Save for the steady rise in lung cancer, much if not most of which is due to tobacco, none of those epidemics has actually materialized...
...it would now occur in "the near term and the future...
...No layman can permit himself to form an opinion on the estimated fraction of cancer associated with any particular environmental factor...
...There was, finally, another striking aspect of this study...
...Since, in all these cases, names were on the record, we may assume that the proponents of this theory were sincere...
...According to Peto, the major causal factors in human cancer were tobacco and diet...
...cancer was a modern political disease that had emerged almost exclusively from the test tubes, assembly lines, and smoke stacks o f American factories...
...and many, possibly most, have never known the meaning of the scientific words they were transmitting so excitedly to the public...
...The epidemiologist fathers of the theory of environmental cancer had made the first "axiom" of the apocalypse a scientific impossibility...
...The numbors and the trends point clearly to the calamity that is already upon US...
...And by the late 1960s, the first great integrative summaries and interpretations of the epidemiologists' findings were in print in the form of two books--one by Johannes Clemmesen of Denmark (1965) and one by Richard Doll of the United Kingdom (1967), both classic works in the study of environmental cancer...
...9 Michael Shimkin, observing that the estimates are " a good deal higher than might be legitimately based on scientific knowledge we now have," said: " I am somewhat surprised [that] scientists at the national level would themselves allow such a document to come out and be public and appear in the newspapers before it had adequate time for peer review...
...this time that awesome effect was not attributed to nine but to six carcinogens--asbestos, arsenic, benzene, chromium, nickel oxides, and petroleum fractions...
...In other words, the founding director of the IARC and two of the most prominent cancer epidemiologists in Europe and Asia had informed David Rail of NIEHS and Arthur Upton of the NCI, as well as the NCI epidemiologists whose names had appeared on the authorless study, that its feverish extrapolations were baseless...
...Because the study had been prepared for the OSHA hearings of 1978, and because OSHA was using its estimates, Doll and Peto deliberately called it "the OSHA paper...
...But by far the most significant source, because it was most trusted by the press, was "the NCI...
...Since the 1930s--three decades before the cancer apocalypse surged out of the NCI--it had been obvious to trained cancer epidemiologists that the Garden of Eden/post-World War II theory of environmental cancer was a myth...
...and children's cancers, such as retinoblastoma and nephroblastoma...
...This was just a small selection of the data which had been collected by epidemiologists all over the globe...
...At the opening of the meeting, he tried to defend the study...
...Adapted from The Apocalyptics: Politics, Science, and the Big C. ancer Lie, which will be published this year by Simon and Schuster...
...Muir of the Epidemiology Unit of the IARC and co-editor with Richard Doll of Cancer Incidence in Five Continents explained Higginson's reasoning to a scientific audience in New York...
...It cannot be stressed too strongly that both the phenomenon of nature and the concept of culture--i.e., sexual and reproductive practices, dietary patterns, habits such as drinking, smoking, and sunbathing, etc.--were explicitly included in the broader term "environmental, ~' not only by Higginson, but by all the seminal literature...
...After listening to a paper by John Higginson, a prominent cancer scientist, Isaac Berenblum, the basic scientist who had discovered anticarcinogenesis and cocarcinogenesis, and who was one of the fathers of the initiation-promotion theory, delivered a little talk...
...9 In 1976, James Bishop, national energy and environmental correspondent of Newsweek, appeared as an expert interviewer on CBS's "Face the Nation" and declared to the vast mass audience that " . . . it is now generally accepted that about 60 to 90 percent of all human cancer is caused by manmade toxic chemicals of various sorts...
...The "contributors," who included two heads of health agencies, were these: Kenneth Bridford, NIOSH Pierre Decoufle, NCI Joseph F. Fraumeni, Jr., NCI David G. Hoel, NIEHS Robert N. Hoover, NCI David P. Rail, NIEHS (Director) Umberto Saffiotti, NCI Marvin A. Schneiderman, NCI Arthur C. Upton, NCI (Director) There was also a "Contributor to the Appendix," Nicholas Day, NCI...
...Never before had estimates o f 2,000,000 asbestos deaths been made...
...At the end of the meeting, Saffiotti indicated that he was offended by Cairns's expression"manifestly silly...
...One must reach back in time to tell the story, for without prior knowledge of the varying global incidence rates it would be unintelligible...
...some have unquestionably seen themselves as righteous adjuncts of the regulatory process...
...It was eventually reported that the study had been repudiated by "several," "seven," and " a l l " of its "contributors," a story which implied that there had been a revolt by scientific slaves against political masters...
...It was different in several respects from the "draft summary...
...it has shown a consummate cred~ Lhe face of arbitrary edicts bran 3y the policymakers as the voice of scie ; it has been taught by scientists to R secretive or baseless assertions from scientific sources like political scoops...
...The first protest--and perhaps the only one of which laymen were aware--was that of the American Industrial Health Council (AIHC), which released a thunderous critique of the study...
...The meeting was held at the Sheraton International Conference Center in Rest_9 Virginia...
...Not only had the epidemiologists discovered that preindustrial peoples who lived in a "balanced" relationship with nature were dying of a variety of cancers, but they had discovered that in some cases their cancers occurred at far higher rates than did those of industrial peoples...
...A great epidemic was actually an ideological necessity for the apocalyptics, for that alone could validate their beliefs...
...He explained the central "error": In each case, the investigators have taken the highest risk ratio available--ratios obtained for workers exposed to massive concentrations of carcinogens--and multiplied that by the total number of workers who might have been exposed to the carcinogen, even though most or all o f the workers have never been exposed to the concentrations upon which t h e r i s k r a t i o s are based . . . . [The] investigators have also rather sloppily equated deaths with incidence, even though the number of deaths resulting from a tumor is clearly only some fraction of the incidence, depending on the tumor...
...Observing that they were "possibly 1000" times higher than the 2,000 deaths indicated by the Hammond and Selikoff data, he said that the 4,000,000 men said to be employed in the asbestos industry were "all being treated as though they had been asbestos insulators for years...
...They did not begin with a ready-made causal theory...
...and scientists all over the world had been warned that "the OSHA paper" should be treated as a contaminant of the scientific literature...
...The Garden of Eden/post-World War II theory of carcinogens, which had been presented for two decades as a scientific discovery to an advanced industrial nation, was, in fact, a religious-political fairy tale born of the ideological trends of the 1960s...
...IARC...
...This theory was taught by Wilhelm Hueper of the NCI to Rachel Carson, who taught it to Americans throughout the 1960s...
...The 1950s and 1960s were a period of intense ferment and activity in that science generally, and Higginson's study had contributed greatly to the intellectual excitement...
...The paper still had no responsible author, since, by scientific convention, the alphabetized list of names meant that _9 no individual among them was taking responsibility for the data in the paper...
...Indeed, the animal tests which had been conducted since the 1920s had refuted the Garden of Eden theory before American citizens had ever heard of it...
...Umberto Saffiotti: 'Cancer in the last quarter of the 20th century can be considered a social disease, a disease whose causation and control are rooted in the technology and economy of our society.'" _9 In 1975, Dan Rather of CBS-TV News also reporting on discoveries made at the NCI said that "we are suffering a cancer epidemic in slow motion...
...Higginson, said Muir, had compared the differences in the incidence of specific cancers as they were recorded in Vol...
...Thus did Califano start a flash fire that still burns bright in the American labor movement and in the labor movements of the world...
...In the context of this book, it would be absurd to waste time criticizing the press...
...I of Cancer Incidence in Five Continents and had performed the following calculations: Assuming [said Muir] that the smallest rate represented a level which should be considered as due to genetic factors, he [Higginson] postulated that the difference between this rate and the highest observed rate probably represented those cancers due to exogenous factors...
...He concluded that liver cancer "was not of purely racial character" The Garden of Eden/post-World War II theory of carcinogens was a religious-political fairy tale born of the ideological trends of the 1960s...
...Here is the first: In the first place the estimates of the fractions of cancers caused by occupational factors are based only upon the known examples of occupational carcinogens.., only a limited number of occupational exposures have ever been investigated for carcinogenic risk...
...they began with the knowledge of their own ignorance...
...A cancer pox...
...Hueper's doctrine certainly meant the same thing, and so did Saffiotti's 1976 statement in which he expressed the belief that cancer "largely" emerged from "external agents" in our industrial system...
...9 Richard Pet_9 of Oxford mocked the study's asbestos estimates...
Vol. 17 • March 1984 • No. 3
