It seems like every time I open a newspaper or watch a nightly newscast, there’s a new article somewhere in it proclaiming that some substance may cause cancer.
Usually, the substance under scrutiny is either some new group of chemicals with a scary-souding name, like dioxins or polychlorobiphenyls, or an unpopular substance, like second-hand cigarette smoke. And usually, the evidence for this claim of carcinogeneity is spotty at best – a disease-cluster here, an experiment with laboratory rats there, or maybe an isolated population study showing a weak association (an association of less than 2:1) between the substance and a particular form of cancer. Scientifically speaking, we’d have to say that the jury is still out on the substance’s carcinogeneity, but the story appears in print anyway. Obviously, the threat of a new carcinogen makes for better news than a scientific shrug of the shoulders – but I don’t think that’s the whole story as to why such articles appear, nor even the main reason for it.
Cancer is an insidious disease that we still don’t know very much about. And, worse, it has moved up to being the number two killer in America, mostly thanks to the medical conquest of other diseases. It seems that this mad public-health quest to find new carcinogens under every rock is fuelled by the idea that we, the public, are looking for something or someone to blame for all that cancer. We need a well-defined enemy. And we’re taking it out on anything that might make even the tiniest differences in our chances of getting cancer.
If and when we ever stumble upon a real prevention or cure for cancer, these little environmental “carcinogens” are going to seem laughably petty. It will be as though, after having discovered penicillin, we were to look back on the history of pneumonia and see that we used to suspect soggy pets and factory smokestacks of giving us pneumonia because people exposed to these “risk” factors had a 28% better chance of contracting the disease. (Note: I don’t think soggy animal fur or chimney smoke were ever actually implicated as causative agents of pneumonia – but humor me, here.) It will, almost, be reminiscent of the way we blamed witches and black cats for the Bubonic Plague. It will be seen for the irrational grasping-at-straws that it is. And then, worse, once we really have conquered cancer, we’ll start blaming everything for causing heart disease, or for causing whatever other cause-of-death moves up to take cancer’s place.
So: Are we wasting our time and resources, and ousting promising new chemicals from the marketplace, by looking for even the slightest hint of carcinogeneity in everything new and unpopular? Or is the potential economic impact of our quest for carcinogens – in terms of the cost spent to hunt them down, the cost to the producers of the “demonized” substance, and the hidden cost to the public of spending so much of their time reading carcinogen news – a small price to pay for marginally decreasing everyone’s chances of getting cancer?
