Seattlest, October 16, 2007

DEVRA DAVIS SPEAKS TRUTH TO CANCER TREATMENT POWER

[Rachel's introduction: In her stunning new book, The Secret History of the War on Cancer, Dr. Devra Davis calculates that there have been over 10 million preventable cancer deaths over the past 30 years, due to an obsessive, militaristic focus on "beating" the disease, rather than removing carcinogens from our environment or adopting other preventative measures.]

The first thing to know about Devra Davis is that she's not speaking from the sidelines: she's director of the Center for Environmental Oncology at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, is an environmental health expert, professor of epidemiology at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health and visiting professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Heinz School of Public Policy and Management.

So when she said that the war on cancer has been almost completely wrong-headed, we perked up and listened more intently. Last night at Town Hall she spoke about her new book The Secret History of the War on Cancer. The staggering number she's arrived at is that there have been over 10 million preventable cancer deaths over the past 30 years, due to an obsessive, militaristic focus on "beating" the disease, rather than removing carcinogens from our environment or adopting other preventative measures. Discretion, once again, is the better part of valor.

Davis pointed out that as early as 1936, scientists understood that tobacco, diagnostic and solar radiation, benzene, and hormones caused cancer. She detailed how the Pap smear's introduction was stalled -- for more than a decade after it was known to save lives -- because the medical establishment didn't want non-doctors conducting tests. And then of course there's our long, compromised relationship with tobacco, including "doctors prefer Camels" ads and four-pack-a-day directors of anti-cancer initiatives.

If you missed the talk, you can listen to her NPR interview online. We don't know if she points out in that one, though, that the "war on terror" suffers from the same misguided obsession on proving to terrorists who's Number One! while ignoring the environmental factors that supply them. We also found this article where she takes Bjorn Lomborg, another recent Town Hall visitor, to task at Grist for his faulty grasp of statistics and the precautionary principle.

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