The mysterious growth of cancer
Robert Allen says we should look at pollution as the cause of the
rise in cancer deaths
Cancer is a phenomenon of the 20th century. Doctors say that one
in three of us will get some form of cancer during our lifetime.
In the 26 Counties one in four deaths is caused by cancer. The
top killers are lung, bowel and breast cancer.
Surprisingly this doesn't appear to bother us - or if it does we
don't react until it either hits us or one of our family and by
then grief consumes our rage. Of the 19,316 people who contracted
cancer in the 26 Counties in 1994, for 7,391 it was fatal.
We are told the reason we get cancer is because of our diets and
lifestyles. We must assume then that the alarming rise of skin
cancer (6,408 cases in the 26 Counties in 1994) is caused by
spending most of our waking hours on sunbeds and at least two
weeks sunning ourselves in some foreign hotspot. We must assume
that the 1,557 lung cancer deaths recorded in the first report of
the 26 Counties Cancer Registry is because of our dependence on
cigarettes. We must assume that our fatty diets and lack of
exercise are the reasons why we succumb to a range of cancers.
These assumptions would be nothing more than that, because the
medical profession - by its own admittance - doesn't know very
much about the causes of cancer. This is strange because
scientists and doctors have been studying cancer for many years
while organisations like the International Agency for Research on
Cancer (IARC) have long been collecting data on carcinogens,
seemingly so that we can avoid exposure.
But it seems that this is all state cancer registries are - well
presented books full of graphs and figures. What is also
remarkable about the 26 Counties Cancer Registry is its failure
to go beyond the 1950s for comparative cancer figures. So while
we know that cancer deaths hovered between 13 and 14 percent in
the 15 years since 1950, rising to 15 percent through 1965 and
1969, stablising at an average of 15.5 percent ever since, this
actually tells us nothing significant. What for example were the
cancer figures for the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries? We don't
know because Westminster's ruling elites weren't too concerned
what Irish people died of in those years.
d these days no one in Dublin is in too much of a hurry to find
out what people died of more than 50 years ago, never mind
centuries ago. So it's doubtful that the Dublin government will
take any notice of the nicely coloured graphics which
dramatically show that the highest cancer risk is in County
Dublin, followed by Louth, Wicklow and Cork. More likely they
will take some comfort from the statistics which less
dramatically show that the overall rate of cancer in Ireland is
similar to other European Countries.
This is interesting because the incidence of cancer is rising all
over the western world and in the developing world, where cancer
was virtually unknown until the latter half of this century,
specific cancers are emerging which appear to show that cancer
has a geographical and social bias.
According to Peter Montague of Environment and Health Weekly,
``cancer rates differ from country to country. When people migrate
from one country to another, within a generation or two their
cancer rates have changed from those of their country of origin
to those of their new homeland. For example, Japanese women
living in Japan have a low rate of breast cancer but Japanese
women who move to the US soon have US rates of breast cancer.
These migration studies tell us that cancers are preventable''.
The recent figures from the US show that the incidence of all
cancers has increased 54.3 percent during the past 45 years and
the death rate for all cancers has increased 9.6%. Rising in
number are cancers of the ovaries, lung, skin, female breast,
prostate, kidney, liver, non-Hodgkin's lymphomas, multiple
myeloma, brain, and pancreas.
There is a discernible pattern in the 26 Counties as well.
Cancers of the female breast, colon, lung, uterine cervix,
prostate, bladder and non-Hodgkin's lymphomas have increased,
some significantly. Why is this?
Regarding breast cancer, the US National Cancer Institute
analysts say that the biggest increase has occurred among
estrogen-responsive tumors. The kind of breast cancer that is
increasing most rapidly is the kind that is influenced by the
presence of estrogen, ``suggesting that some of the changes are
related to hormonal factors,'' they say. Among men the biggest
increase is found in prostate cancer - another cancer influenced
by hormones. The NCI analysts conclude that ``it is possible that
nutritional practices (e.g., increased consumption of fat and
meat) have contributed to the upward trend.''
It is easier therefore for governments to blame individual diets
and lifestyles for the rise in cancer and ignore the fact that
carcinogenic pollutants are now abundant in our air, water and
food. Is it really coincidental that the urbanised and heavily
polluted east coast has high cancer rates, and that Cork (with
its plethora of chemical industries) is not far behind? It's time
we started to look for the real causes of the cancers that are
now endemic in Irish society and stop blaming the way people are
forced to live.
``So long as we continue to bathe ourselves in carcinogens in air,
water, and food, and in chemicals that degrade our immune
systems, more of us each passing year will have to learn to live
with cancer,'' says Peter Montague.
We don't have to learn to live with cancer. We have to learn to
start dealing with the causes and eliminate them.
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