Work cancer's deadly history

TUC Risks March 1st 2008 reported that since the Nixon era, successive US administrations have claimed to be fighting a 'war on cancer'. A new book, however, says for much of its history, the cancer war has been fighting the wrong battles, with the wrong weapons, against the wrong enemies.

'The secret history of the war on cancer', a heavyweight publication by US academic Devra Davis and described in a Lancet review as 'a rattling good read', says while campaigns have targeted the disease, they've singularly failed to address the causes. High on this list, alongside tobacco and alcohol, are occupational and environmental exposures to carcinogens.

Davis, director of the Center for Environmental Oncology at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, says not only did authorities overlook how the world in which we live and work affects our chances of getting cancer, information making the links was routinely suppressed. There was a simple enough reason for this - the official cancer effort was directed by leaders of the industries that generated a host of cancer causing materials and products. Davis says the economic interest lay in making the disease less deadly, but never in preventing it altogether.

The high and increasing death toll in the UK from occupational cancer would certainly appear to prove her right.


The secret history of the war on cancer. Devra Davis. ISBN 978 0 465 01566 5 2. £16.99.