J wrote:
> http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599...71-421,00.html
> Is your job giving you cancer?
>
> February 10, 2008 12:00am http://www.cbc.ca/consumers/market/f...hodecides.html
Who decides what causes cancer?
Broadcast: January 14, 2003
The following passages are excerpted from "The IARC Monographs Program: Changing Attitudes Towards Public Health",
published in the Apr/Jun 2002 issue of the peer-reviewed International Journal of Occupational and Environmental
Health.
The author is Dr. Lorenzo Tomatis, former Director of the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) from
1982 to 1993. (The IARC Monographs Program, first begun in 1971, represented the first official attempt by an
international organization to provide exhaustive information about environmental carcinogens):
"It was clear from the beginning that evaluations of evidence of carcinogenicity should be a matter of scientific
judgment. Absolute priority was given to the reliability of the data on which the final evaluations of
carcinogenicity were based, and the strength of the Monographs program was its scientific integrity. The
painstaking searches of the scientific literature by the IARC team, the dedicated contributions of the experts in
preparing their assigned position papers, and the intense joint effort during the eight days of the working group
meetings resulted for more than two decades in a series of scientifically unassailable monographs, which became
known worldwide as "the orange books", from the color of their covers. Although some of the evaluations were
heavily attacked by industry or by scientists who sided with industry, never, in those years, was any evaluation
invalidated on scientific grounds."
....
"Within the IARC Monographs program, the respective roles of human and experimental data in defining and/or
predicting human risk were amply and repeatedly debated... The experimental evidence maintained its full validity
in demonstrating the carcinogenicity of an agent and in serving as an alert that similar effect(s) might occur in
humans, therefore, even if the size of the risk could not be measured accurately. Not only does the experimental
induction of tumors confirm clinical or epidemiological observations, as was shown for the first time with chimney
soot, but also there is abundant evidence that it can precede and predict human cancer. The experimental evidence
for the carcinogenicities of many agents preceded observations of their carcinogenicities in humans and would have
allowed implementation of early, life-saving preventive measures."
....
"The IARC considered, therefore, that in the absence of adequate human data, it is biologically plausible and
prudent to regard agents for which there is sufficient evidence of carcinogenicity in laboratory animals as if they
present a carcinogenic risk to humans. In so doing, the IARC, anticipating what later became known as the
"precautionary principle", was trying to reconcile a scientifically accurate analysis of the data with an
interpretation of the evidence of carcinogenicity provided by experimental data that is not only biologically
plausible but is public health-oriented and gives priority to primary prevention.
The credibility of experimental results as effective predictors of human risk was systematically questioned by
industry, which was concerned that the evaluation of some of its products as potentially carcinogenic in humans
would jeopardize profits and production rentability. For this reason, industry made many attempts to deny,
contradict or conceal data that did not suit their production plans, as exemplified by the well-documented cases of
asbestos and vinyl chloride. The industry point of view was supported by numerous scientists who were either
directly or indirectly associated with industrial laboratories or who, with rather myopic good faith and a
disregard for public health, stubbornly sought greater certitude than the available methods could provide. The
attitude of industry and the lukewarm reaction of the regulatory agencies, which should have had public health as
their first priority, led to indirect but efficient support in large sectors of the scientific establishment for
the view that even doubtful or inadequate negative epidemiologic findings should be considered more relevant than
clearly positive experimental findings.
Primary prevention of even the most obvious carcinogenic hazard therefore encountered serious obstacles and
unjustified delays. Aromatic amines were shown to be carcinogenic at the end of the 19th century, and the
International Labor Office declared benzidine and 2-naphthylamine to be human carcinogens in 1921, but the first
official effort to phase out aromatic amines was taken only in the 1970s. The first observation of an increased
cancer risk in workers exposed to BMCE goes back at least to 1962, but regulators took no action until 1975."
....
The article concludes:
"During the third period of the Monographs program [i.e. from 1994 to the present], it is not totally clear that
the revised evaluations of carcinogenicity arrived at during this period were inspired solely by a desire to be
rigidly, and perhaps at times myopically, scientific. One may question whether interests other than purely
scientific were possibly involved in reaching conclusions that are not based on the principle of rigorous
hypothesis testing, and in revising evaluations towards an absence of risk to humans. Indeed, evidence of
carcinogenicity provided by the result of experimental bioassays appears too often to have been disregarded on the
basis of only suggested mechanistic hypotheses. Ominous consequences on public health may follow if such
hypotheses, once actually tested experimentally, are shown to be incorrect, or if they do not account adequately
for the wide range of susceptibility that is known to exist in human populations. The revised evaluations may
therefore open the door to free exploitations of products, the production and use of which should instead be
strictly regulated or banned.
OT: Please Ignore The Trolls On This Group 
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