The South African media seems to have blissfully ignored one of the most important health stories of the decade — last week’s report by President Obama’s Cancer Panel (PCP) which, finally, has turned the tables on the entire cancer industry from within.
While the PCP report focuses on the cancer epidemic in the US — everything in it is of relevance to us and humanity at large: finally they admit we are being systematically poisoned to death by carcinogenic chemicals and industrial radiation.
This may come as no surprise to those of you who follow the natural health paradigm — but it represents a profound shift for the orthodox medical fraternity.
The message from the PCP to President Obama (and leaders everywhere) is loud and clear: if we hope to reduce cancer rates, we must eliminate cancer-causing chemicals in foods, medicines, personal care products and our work and home environments.
“The panel urges you (Pres Obama) most strongly to use the power of your office to remove the carcinogens and other toxins from our food, water and air that needlessly increase healthcare costs, cripple our nation’s productivity and devastate American lives,” said the PCP.
Of course the American Cancer Association and the chemical industry have waded into the PCP report; they have been in deliberate denial about the causes of cancer for decades. For them cancer is in the genes or just bad luck in the roulette of life, and they keep on spewing out — and defending — the toxic nightmare across the planet.
The PCP report points out that Americans (as well as the rest of us who live in big cities) are daily exposed to about 80 000 industrial and agricultural chemicals (and dozens more new ones each year) yet only a few hundred of them have ever been safety tested.
Many of these chemicals are known or suspected carcinogens or endocrine-disruptors. They are in the foods we eat, the water we drink, the air we breathe; they are in our shampoos and mascaras, our furniture, baby bottles and our cars; they are everywhere.
Many are totally unregulated and where there is enforcement, it is weak. In virtually all cases, says the PCP, safety regulations fail to take multiple exposures and exposure interactions into account. Nor, might I add, do they take into account the “synergistic” effects of all these toxins.
The PCP says we are also poisoning the unborn: numerous environmental contaminants can cross the placental barrier and, to a disturbing extent, babies are being born “pre-polluted”.
The PCP report is groundbreaking because the panel comes from the heartland of orthodox medicine in the US, not the fringe of homeopaths and natural healers who have (correctly) been blaming cancer on industrial pollution for over a century.
So, finally, it seems, the orthodox medical community is being dragged (albeit kicking) into the 21st century and that the war on cancer will now focus on what’s really important: not the pharmaceutical “cures” but the causes. And we don’t have to look far for the culprits.
Having watched my father die a sordid death by cancer some months ago, and having witnessed how the orthodox medical system profited so handsomely from his terror with drugs and deceit, this report offers a glimmer of hope for the future — it has placed the spotlight firmly on preventative health and healthy lifestyles, and away from the sickening pharma paradigm that has dominated and harmed the cancer discourse for so long.
@Andy
Silly question. I know too much about Aspartame to consider what you write.
@Andy
The thing with science is that it is actually rather accessible in general. Medical science of the nature discussed here boils down to statistical techniques – it is arguably the easiest to understand. But you seem to have a rather specific agenda, namely to keep people in awe of science, rather than to get them to use it (or understand its limitations). As for my own qualifications, I spent some time working through similar work on radiation hazards, and funny enough, I recall similar complaints being made about the more critical studies (Gofman, O’Connor) – eventually their arguments won, and I’m using one of their arguments, though I doubt you’d know which one.
I notice that you haven’t supplied any engineering studies with such wide CIs. Frankly, I doubt you would find any non-post-facto engineering studies that utilize CIs whatsoever.
You abuse Occam’s razor – I have supplied structural reasons why they must reach similar conclusions, without conspiracy – structural reasons similar to why most newspapers missed the obvious US fraud on WMD in Iraq – no conspiracy needed, only a structural unwillingness to examine certain claims critically. By your structure of argument, the ‘close association of alternative practioners’ (which you haven’t demonstrated, though I’m sure I’m nitpicking again) is conspiracy theory – again, you are proving my point.
But I do find it funny (and perverse) that gaping structural flaws (pointed out in the literature) become nitpicking when I point them out.
@Andy
Another thing, about that ecological fallacy – the fallacy makes the inference certain, rather than tentative – it does not render the inference definitely false. One should still seek a mechanism, but without a known mechanism, a correlation should still counsel caution.
@Lesogo – It tastes like some weird metal, but I do get intestinal discomfort from using that stuff.
@Andy
Another thing – that paper you cited with the huge n (500k) – it is not so huge – the number of brain cancers included is about 2k, which is really the upper bound of the statistical power of the study. As such, you are right, one cannot expect better CIs (even ignoring their poor methodology) – a much larger n would be needed.
@Andy re your comment on May 17th, 2010 at 12:47 pm
Shouldn’t you see a spike in cancers? Maybe you haven’t read the literature – cancer has been increasing (especially among children), and the question is whether it is environmental factors, or better diagnosis. Perhaps it is both. As an example, see
Cancer Surveillance Series: Recent Trends in Childhood Cancer Incidence and Mortality in the United States
Martha S. Linet, Lynn A. G. Ries, Malcolm A. Smith, Robert E. Tarone, Susan S. Devesa
Journal of the National Cancer Institute, Vol. 91, No. 12, 1051-1058, June 16, 1999
@Andy
Another thing about that cancer spike you seek: If aspartame results (say) in a 50% increase in cancers among its users, and 10% of the population uses it, we expect a 5% increase in cancers – much less than the statistical noise – we are having trouble getting CIs narrower than 60%, let alone 5%.
@Andy
One more thing – your ‘conspiracy theory’ complaint seems to imply outright fraud on the part of scientists. Having read several critiques of such studies, I’ve found that the general trend in creating studies that ‘find no correlation’ is to choose n small enough that very few cases are expected in the population to be tested, to make categories problematic, often with some thinly veiled claptrap that begs the question, i.e. sidesteps the hypotheses to be tested, and to loudly proclaim a central estimate (e.g. of a risk ratio) that is below one, but to pooh-pooh an estimate above one, even when the latter has a p>0.001.
Take those cancer studies that you mentioned as an example, and we see a structural problem related to the small n: in the US, sugar/sweetened product consumption is greatest among poorer people, yet poorer people in USA often have little to no medical coverage, which leads to lower rates of detection. A meaningful study would study that population as well, but cannot due to funding constraints – a structural problem – you alone imply conspiracy.
Re my post on May 18th, 2010 at 7:04 pm
I meant to say that if aspartame had such a low survival rate and were such an acute poison, I’m sure the FDA would have banned it.
ok, so what do the studies say (worst case best case)? By what % have I increased my risk of getting cancer by being a regular user of aspartame? (say for 10 years). Bearing in mind that of course, if I had a 0.0001 chance of getting cancer a 20 % increase in the chance would mean I now had a 0.00012 chance
@Dave
Good to hear you’re still around. I would not go out and buy green bananas though.
@Dave
It depends on which studies you believe, but increases between 10 and 70% over baseline have been claimed (as compared to the 20% of your example). Also at issue is which type of cancer – some of the cancers for which Aspartame is suspected of increasing the risk are fairly rare to start with, e.g. certain brain cancers. I’d have to go read up to see what the baseline risk is for these, but your order-of-magnitude baseline estimate sounds about right, maybe within an order of magnitude.
So your risk remains low, but the total societal cost thereof is high.
I’m not a scientist, but I do not believe that the FDA and other regulatory institutions have only the good of the consumer at heart!
Read Eric Schlosser’s (Spelling?) “The Fast Food Nation” for an insight into how regulators can be manipulated. That book was the catalyst for the experiment undertaken by the man (whose name eludes me) who tried to live on MacDonald’s for a month, and was filmed. It’s truly scary stuff. I don’t doubt that many of the great “new” things in our lives are bad for us.
As for Aspartame – just try getting used to less sweetness – it isn’t so hard.