The Secret History of the War on Cancer
by Devra Davis
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Book Summary Information
Author: Devra DavisEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2009-02-24
ISBN: 0465015689
Number of pages: 560
Publisher: Basic Books
Book Reviews of The Secret History of the War on Cancer
Book Review: Are Cancer Specialists Specious?
Summary: 5 Stars
This is one of the most important public health books you will ever read.
It is a damning indictment of how professional cancer researchers have been compromised and corrupted by their ties to major carcinogenicists, such as the chemical, tobacco, petroleum, and pharmaceutical industries.
The author, who is a religious Jew, is extremely broadminded and fair. For example, while condemning the Nazis as brutal mass murderers, she also is willing to acknowledge the progressiveness of some of their public health efforts (such as trying to ban tobacco and discouraging pregnant women from drinking).
This book also has some wonderfully humane insights, such as when the author prays at her ill father's bedside, describing a beautiful sunrise to him in his comatose state. Later, after awakening from the coma, he tells her that he had heard every word!
If you do not read this book, you will find that while ignorance may be bliss it also may very well kill you.
SOME QUOTES FROM THE OPENING PAGES OF THIS BOOK:
.... Whether about smoking in public spaces or the chlorination of drinking water, each volume [of NAS reports] navigated treacherous and uncertain waters, and each ended with the familiar message: we need more research before we can be sure. I watched the maturing of the science of doubt promotion - the concerted and well-funded effort to identify, magnify and exaggerate doubts about what we could say that we know as a way of delaying actions to change the way the world operates.
How did we get to this point? Since its formal launch more than thirty-five years ago, the war on cancer has been fighting many of the wrong battles with the wrong weapons and the wrong leaders. Officially declared by President Nixon in 1971, the American effort aggressively targeted the illness but left its myriad causes untouched. Less than a decade after the famed U.S. Surgeon General's report of 1964 indicted tobacco as a cause of lung cancer, the president announced a national attack on cancer. Left off the table completely were tobacco, radiation, asbestos and benzene - materials that for decades had been well understood to be hazardous.
Years before any modern industrial nation started an official war on the disease, in the 1930s, researchers in Germany, Japan, Italy, Scotland, Austria, England, Argentina, the United States and France had shown that where people lived and worked affected their chances of getting cancer. Hueper published a sweeping synthesis of industrial, pharmaceutical and natural sources of cancer - at an especially inauspicious time, right after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. The war against those things that cause cancer has always been hampered whenever nations have traded metaphorical wars for real ones.
If some scientists had figured out nearly a century ago that the world around us affects the chance that we will develop cancer, why have we made so little headway in controlling these causes? My goal in this book is to explain when, how, why and by whom the spotlight has been kept away from many of the things that produce cancer. I will show how two radically different sets of standards have been applied to learning how to treat the disease on the one hand, and figuring out what produces it on the other. Where animal studies on the causes of cancer exist, they are often faulted as not relevant to humans. Yet when studies of almost identical design are employed to craft novel treatments and therapies, the physiological differences between animals and humans suddenly become insignificant.
.... Since World War II, whenever and however information on the cancer hazards of the workplace and the environment has been generated, it has typically been discredited, dismissed, or disparaged.
.... Scientists who tacked industrial causes of cancer often found themselves facing subtle and sometimes not so subtle warnings. Those who resisted pressure to back off often found their funding cut. In some cases, scientific research was stopped dead in its tracks, and many careers, like Hueper's, were derailed.
.... For decades, critics of the cancer establishment have protested - some thoughtfully, others stridently - the limited nature of the cancer war and the revolving door of cancer researchers in and out of cancer-causing industries. If many of these critiques have been animated and angry, they were not necessarily, for that reason, wrong.
.... I have come to admire the bold and compassionate work that is being carried out by cancer caregivers and researchers today. There are remarkable efforts under way involving natural products and breakthrough approaches in clinical trials, pushed by cancer patients who often have nothing to lose and doctors who may be wrestling with the disease themselves.
There is no one who deals with the disease now who doubts that we need to open a new front. To reduce the burden of cancer today, we must prevent it from arising in the first place, and we have to find new ways to keep the millions of cancer survivors from relapsing. No matter how efficient we become at treating cancer, we have to tackle those things that cause the disease to occur or recur. I believe that if we had acted on what has long been known about the industrial and environmental causes of cancer when this war first began, at least a million and a half lives could have been spared, a huge casualty rate that those who have managed the war on cancer must answer for. This book explains how I have come to that reckoning.
Summary of The Secret History of the War on Cancer
Why has the “War on Cancer? languished, focusing mainly on finding and treating the disease and downplaying the need to control and combat cancer?s basic causes—tobacco, the workplace, radiation, and the general environment? This war has targeted the wrong enemies with the wrong weapons, failing to address well-known cancer causes.
As epidemiologist Devra Davis shows in this superbly researched exposé, this is no accident. The War on Cancer has followed the commercial interests of industries that generated a host of cancer-causing materials and products. This is the gripping story of a major public health effort diverted and distorted for private gain that is being reclaimed through efforts to green health care and the environment.
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