Daily News Archive
From
June 13, 2002
National Cancer
Foundation Accused of Failing to Inform Public of Known Cancer Risks
A press release by Samuel S. Epstein, M.D., (Chairman of the Cancer Prevention Coalition and Professor Emeritus of Environmental and Occupational Medicine, University of Illinois School of Public Health, Chicago), and Quentin D. Young, M.D., (Chairman of the Health and Medicine Policy Research Group) charges that major national cancers foundations, The National Cancer Institute And American Cancer Society, have long ignored dramatic increases in childhood cancer rates.
Childhood cancers have increased by 26% overall. Rates of some specific cancers have increased even more dramatically - acute lymphocyte leukemia by 62%; brain cancer by 50%; and bone cancer by 40%. The release charges that the federal National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the American Cancer Society (ACS) have "failed to inform the public, let alone Congress and regulatory agencies, of this alarming information. As importantly, they have failed to publicize well-documented scientific information on avoidable causes responsible for the increased incidence of childhood cancer."
Causes pointed out in the release are pesticides and other synthetic chemicals. Included also as important, avoidable causes of childhood cancer are the consumption of non-organic foods containing pesticide residue and the treatment of lice and scabies with the pesticide and human carcinogen lindane. Other common synthetic chemicals are also included in the list.
The release charges
that the ASC has long supported the chlorine industry in their continued
defense of the use of chlorinated pesticides. It goes on to show that
both organizations have dramatically increasing their financial resources
while spending negligible amounts to warn the public of avoidable cancer
risks.