The Strange Case of the Report of the President's Cancer Panel
By now you've surely heard or read about "Reducing Environmental Cancer Risk: What We Can Do Now", which is the title of the recently released annual report of the President's Cancer Panel. You've also likely read that the American Cancer Society, no laggard when it comes to stirring up anxiety about cancer, has criticized the report's unfounded claims of wanton devastation from heretofore largely unknown, and still yet to be identified, man-made and occasionally natural carcinogens. But have you read the report itself? You should; it's quite an eye opener.
First, there's the advocacy. There are calls for massive new regulatory schemes based on what the authors think the "precautionary principle" means - i.e. that everything with a CAS number is suspect and can't be trusted until it has been studied not just alone but in every conceivable combination and concentration with the other 80,000 chemicals in use today. There are calls for "environmental justice". There are calls for expensive home water filtering, the end of plastic food and beverage containers, the consumption of "organic" food, lots more "black box" epidemiology and, most importantly for the plaintiffs' bar, "an environmental health paradigm for long-latency diseases .. to enable regulatory action based on compelling animal and in vitro evidence before cause and effect in humans is established". That last bit is all about the emerging "low dose" theory, the newest attack on "the dose makes the poison", explained in the introduction of the report as "harmful effects that may occur only at very low doses".
Then there's the science, or rather, the argumentum ad ignorantiam. The document is largely free of objective data. The authors admit at the outset that cancer incidence and mortality is falling, that not much is known about the causes of cancer and that the evidence concerning the consequences of "cumulative lifetime exposure" to most environmental contaminants is unknown and unstudied. Yet because so much is unknown, because environmental cancers are "grossly under-recognized" and because they are "shattering" and "devastating" the lives of so many Americans, congress must act. And what sorts of things are imperiling our well being? Electricity, clean water, cell phones and juice bottles to name a few. When data does make an appearance it is often put to embarrassingly bad purposes. For example, one section implies the following: ionizing radiation causes cancer; electromagnetic fields are a form of radiation; therefore, electric wires, cell phones and Wi-Fi routers need to be avoided and regulated as carcinogens.
Early on the authors set out their premise: "Most environmental hazards with the potential to raise cancer risk are the product of human activity ..." The claim is never supported (which is not surprising as it conflicts with what is known about the causes of cancer today) but it's the one consistent theme that runs throughout the paper and it thoroughly accounts for its conclusions. At the end there's a laundry list of chemicals and things to worry about; it's long enough to keep toxic tort lawyers and their experts (some of whom were interviewed by the panel) busy for decades. So it goes.
