A crusader at Pitt tells how cancer prevention was stymied

http://post-gazette.com/pg/07278/823075-44.stm

A crusader at Pitt tells how cancer prevention was stymied

Friday, October 05, 2007
By Bob Hoover, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Pam Panchak / Post-Gazette

Dr. Devra Davis, director of the Center for Environmental Oncology at
the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute.

As the events marking National Breast Cancer Awareness Month begin
this week, a new book by a University of Pittsburgh researcher has
been garnering national attention with charges that America's efforts
to prevent cancer have been largely ignored for political and
commercial reasons.

Medical science has down-played prevention in favor of a massive
campaign to cure the disease, Devra Davis, director of Pitt's Center
for Environmental Oncology, says in her book, "The Secret History of
the War on Cancer" (Basic Books, $27.95).

In the book, which goes on sale next week, Dr. Davis alleges:

Her appointment to a multimillion-dollar breast cancer research
program in the Clinton administration was sidetracked by the chemical
industry that opposed her efforts to identify environment sources of
the disease.

A reluctant medical profession blocked the widespread use of the Pap
smear to detect cancer of the cervix for a decade because it resisted
the use of laboratory technicians, rather than physicians, to read
test results.

Links between tobacco, X-rays, sunlight, hormones and such widespread
chemicals as benzene were recognized by scientists in 1936, with
little if any precautions taken over subsequent decades.

The United States has tripled the purchase of products containing
asbestos, a known carcinogen, from Mexico since 2000, while much of
the world including the European Union, has banned the use of the
substance.

Both the American Cancer Society and American Medical Association were
allied with the tobacco industry for years, even after the U.S.
surgeon general's 1964 report linking smoking and lung cancer.

Pennsylvania continues to feel the effects of this former partnership,
Dr. Davis explains, in its law restricting municipalities from
limiting smoking in restaurants and bars. That is the law that stalled
Allegheny County's efforts this year to ban smoking.

She also notes that Eugene Knopf, a lobbyist for the American Cancer
Society's state chapter, quit in 1993 to work for the American Tobacco
Institute after, she alleges, he manipulated the chapter into
supporting a law that effectively blocked local control of smoking.

Dr. Davis yesterday discussed her book on National Public Radio, and
next week, Newsweek magazine plans to feature it as its "book of the
week."

Much of her information is drawn from a long-ignored report to the
National Cancer Institute during the Carter administration that she
unearthed in her research.

Based on interviews with 80 key figures from the history of cancer
research, the study "showed that the revolving door of industrial and
government cancer experts had operated since the earliest efforts to
deal with cancer nationwide," Dr. Davis said.

Sources of cancer were identified in both the home and workplace by
these figures starting in the 1930s, but the proof that "how we live
and work affects the chances we may get cancer was basically ignored"
by the federally funded "war on cancer" launched by President Richard
Nixon in 1971.

At the same time that war was under way, the U.S. government was
funding research on a "safe cigarette," Dr. Davis said.

The federal government spent $40 million from 1968 to 1979 through an
agency dubbed the Less Hazardous Cigarette Working Group that oversaw
the development of 100 experimental products. Although filters were
believed to be the most-effective way to reduce tar and nicotine from
tobacco, they caused people to smoke more cigarettes in order to
maintain their nicotine levels, Dr. Davis shows.

She also points out that the filter of one of the first popular "safe
cigarettes," Kent, actually contained asbestos. Nearly 600 million
packs of Kent were sold before it was changed in 1956.

A native of Donora, Dr. Davis used the 1948 incident in that former
industrial town in which 20 people died during a temperature
inversion, as the starting point for her 2002 book, "When Smoke Ran
Like Water," a history of air pollution. It was a finalist for the
National Book Award.

Dr. Davis, 60, has held public positions in the Carter and Clinton
administrations, advised the World Health Organization and also is a
professor of epidemiology in Pitt's Graduate School of Public Health.