17 July 1997 Edition

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The mysterious growth of cancer

Robert Allen says we should look at pollution as the cause of the rise in cancer deaths


Cancer is a phenomenon of the 20th century. Doctors say that one in three of us will get some form of cancer during our lifetime. In the 26 Counties one in four deaths is caused by cancer. The top killers are lung, bowel and breast cancer.

Surprisingly this doesn't appear to bother us - or if it does we don't react until it either hits us or one of our family and by then grief consumes our rage. Of the 19,316 people who contracted cancer in the 26 Counties in 1994, for 7,391 it was fatal.

We are told the reason we get cancer is because of our diets and lifestyles. We must assume then that the alarming rise of skin cancer (6,408 cases in the 26 Counties in 1994) is caused by spending most of our waking hours on sunbeds and at least two weeks sunning ourselves in some foreign hotspot. We must assume that the 1,557 lung cancer deaths recorded in the first report of the 26 Counties Cancer Registry is because of our dependence on cigarettes. We must assume that our fatty diets and lack of exercise are the reasons why we succumb to a range of cancers.

These assumptions would be nothing more than that, because the medical profession - by its own admittance - doesn't know very much about the causes of cancer. This is strange because scientists and doctors have been studying cancer for many years while organisations like the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) have long been collecting data on carcinogens, seemingly so that we can avoid exposure.

But it seems that this is all state cancer registries are - well presented books full of graphs and figures. What is also remarkable about the 26 Counties Cancer Registry is its failure to go beyond the 1950s for comparative cancer figures. So while we know that cancer deaths hovered between 13 and 14 percent in the 15 years since 1950, rising to 15 percent through 1965 and 1969, stablising at an average of 15.5 percent ever since, this actually tells us nothing significant. What for example were the cancer figures for the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries? We don't know because Westminster's ruling elites weren't too concerned what Irish people died of in those years.

And these days no one in Dublin is in too much of a hurry to find out what people died of more than 50 years ago, never mind centuries ago. So it's doubtful that the Dublin government will take any notice of the nicely coloured graphics which dramatically show that the highest cancer risk is in County Dublin, followed by Louth, Wicklow and Cork. More likely they will take some comfort from the statistics which less dramatically show that the overall rate of cancer in Ireland is similar to other European Countries.

This is interesting because the incidence of cancer is rising all over the western world and in the developing world, where cancer was virtually unknown until the latter half of this century, specific cancers are emerging which appear to show that cancer has a geographical and social bias.

According to Peter Montague of Environment and Health Weekly, ``cancer rates differ from country to country. When people migrate from one country to another, within a generation or two their cancer rates have changed from those of their country of origin to those of their new homeland. For example, Japanese women living in Japan have a low rate of breast cancer but Japanese women who move to the US soon have US rates of breast cancer. These migration studies tell us that cancers are preventable''.

The recent figures from the US show that the incidence of all cancers has increased 54.3 percent during the past 45 years and the death rate for all cancers has increased 9.6%. Rising in number are cancers of the ovaries, lung, skin, female breast, prostate, kidney, liver, non-Hodgkin's lymphomas, multiple myeloma, brain, and pancreas.

There is a discernible pattern in the 26 Counties as well. Cancers of the female breast, colon, lung, uterine cervix, prostate, bladder and non-Hodgkin's lymphomas have increased, some significantly. Why is this?

Regarding breast cancer, the US National Cancer Institute analysts say that the biggest increase has occurred among estrogen-responsive tumors. The kind of breast cancer that is increasing most rapidly is the kind that is influenced by the presence of estrogen, ``suggesting that some of the changes are related to hormonal factors,'' they say. Among men the biggest increase is found in prostate cancer - another cancer influenced by hormones. The NCI analysts conclude that ``it is possible that nutritional practices (e.g., increased consumption of fat and meat) have contributed to the upward trend.''

It is easier therefore for governments to blame individual diets and lifestyles for the rise in cancer and ignore the fact that carcinogenic pollutants are now abundant in our air, water and food. Is it really coincidental that the urbanised and heavily polluted east coast has high cancer rates, and that Cork (with its plethora of chemical industries) is not far behind? It's time we started to look for the real causes of the cancers that are now endemic in Irish society and stop blaming the way people are forced to live.

``So long as we continue to bathe ourselves in carcinogens in air, water, and food, and in chemicals that degrade our immune systems, more of us each passing year will have to learn to live with cancer,'' says Peter Montague.

We don't have to learn to live with cancer. We have to learn to start dealing with the causes and eliminate them.


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