A crusader at Pitt tells how cancer prevention was stymied

Friday, October 05, 2007
By Bob Hoover, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Pam Panchak / Post-Gazette
http://www.post- gazette.com/ pg/07278/ 823075-44. stm

As the events marking National Breast Cancer Awareness Month begin
this
week, a new book by a University of Pittsburgh researcher has been
garnering national attention with charges that America's efforts to
prevent cancer have been largely ignored for political and commercial
reasons.

Medical science has down-played prevention in favor of a massive
campaign
to cure the disease, Devra Davis, director of Pitt's Center for
Environmental Oncology, says in her book, "The Secret History of the
War
on Cancer" (Basic Books, $27.95).
http://www.amazon. com/Secret- History-War- Cancer/dp/ 0465015662

In the book, which goes on sale next week, Dr. Davis alleges:

* Her appointment to a multimillion- dollar breast cancer research
program
in the Clinton administration was sidetracked by the chemical industry
that opposed her efforts to identify environment sources of the
disease.

* A reluctant medical profession blocked the widespread use of the Pap
smear to detect cancer of the cervix for a decade because it resisted
the
use of laboratory technicians, rather than physicians, to read test
results.

* Links between tobacco, X-rays, sunlight, hormones and such
widespread
chemicals as benzene were recognized by scientists in 1936, with
little if
any precautions taken over subsequent decades.

* The United States has tripled the purchase of products containing
asbestos, a known carcinogen, from Mexico since 2000, while much of
the
world including the European Union, has banned the use of the
substance.

* Both the American Cancer Society and American Medical Association
were
allied with the tobacco industry for years, even after the U.S.
surgeon
general's 1964 report linking smoking and lung cancer.

Pennsylvania continues to feel the effects of this former partnership,
Dr.
Davis explains, in its law restricting municipalities from limiting
smoking in restaurants and bars. That is the law that stalled
Allegheny
County's efforts this year to ban smoking.

She also notes that Eugene Knopf, a lobbyist for the American Cancer
Society's state chapter, quit in 1993 to work for the American Tobacco
Institute after, she alleges, he manipulated the chapter into
supporting a
law that effectively blocked local control of smoking.

Dr. Davis yesterday discussed her book on National Public Radio, and
next
week, Newsweek magazine plans to feature it as its "book of the week."

Much of her information is drawn from a long-ignored report to the
National Cancer Institute during the Carter administration that she
unearthed in her research.

Based on interviews with 80 key figures from the history of cancer
research, the study "showed that the revolving door of industrial and
government cancer experts had operated since the earliest efforts to
deal
with cancer nationwide," Dr. Davis said.

Sources of cancer were identified in both the home and workplace by
these
figures starting in the 1930s, but the proof that "how we live and
work
affects the chances we may get cancer was basically ignored" by the
federally funded "war on cancer" launched by President Richard Nixon
in
1971.

At the same time that war was under way, the U.S. government was
funding
research on a "safe cigarette," Dr. Davis said.

The federal government spent $40 million from 1968 to 1979 through an
agency dubbed the Less Hazardous Cigarette Working Group that oversaw
the
development of 100 experimental products. Although filters were
believed
to be the most-effective way to reduce tar and nicotine from tobacco,
they
caused people to smoke more cigarettes in order to maintain their
nicotine
levels, Dr. Davis shows.

She also points out that the filter of one of the first popular "safe
cigarettes," Kent, actually contained asbestos. Nearly 600 million
packs
of Kent were sold before it was changed in 1956.

A native of Donora, Dr. Davis used the 1948 incident in that former
industrial town in which 20 people died during a temperature
inversion, as
the starting point for her 2002 book, "When Smoke Ran Like Water," a
history of air pollution. It was a finalist for the National Book
Award.

Dr. Davis, 60, has held public positions in the Carter and Clinton
administrations, advised the World Health Organization and also is a
professor of epidemiology in Pitt's Graduate School of Public Health.

First published on October 5, 2007 at 12:00 am

Post-Gazette Book Editor Bob Hoover can be reached at
bhoover@post- gazette.com or 412-263-1634.