Fear is the stock in trade of the antitechnologists, and lack of knowledge exacerbates fear. The myth that there is an epidemic of cancer caused by industrially produced chemicals has proven, therefore, to be a gold mine for pseudoenvironmentalist propagandists. If you are in their business, however, one Bruce Ames can spoil your whole year. Ames and his colleagues and coworkers just keep churning out research data that discredits this myth - the principal myth that keeps the Environmental Protection Agency in business. In "Environmental Pollution, Pesticides, and the Prevention of Cancer: Misconceptions'' by B. N. Ames and L. S. Gold, to be published in the November issue of the
1. "Cancer rates are soaring.'' Overall mortality (excluding smoking induced lung cancer) from cancer has decreased 16% since 1950.
2. "Environmental synthetic chemicals are an important cause of human cancer.'' The percentage of cancers induced by such chemicals is so low that it cannot be measured reliably enough to verify, while the cancer-causing effects of banning chemicals, such as diminished consumption of fruits and vegetables, are high and easily measurable.
3. "Reducing pesticide residues is an effective way to prevent diet-related cancer.'' Plant-produced pesticides constitute most of the pesticides in fruits and vegetables and are generally harmless anyway.
4. "Human exposures to carcinogens and other potential hazards are nearly all to synthetic chemicals.'' An estimated 99.9% of the chemicals humans ingest are natural and these natural chemicals have the same overall cancer-causing potential as synthetic chemicals.
5. "Cancer risks to humans can be assessed by standard high-dose animal cancer tests.'' These high dose experiments are erroneously extrapolated to ordinary dose levels by means of a linear, no-threshold
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hypothesis that is not consistent with biological facts.
6. "Synthetic chemicals pose greater carcinogenic hazards than natural chemicals.'' In fact, half of all chemicals tested in the standard high-dose animal tests are found to be "carcinogenic'' - half of the synthetic chemicals and half of the natural chemicals. Of the 28 tested natural compounds from coffee, 19 have been classed "carcinogenic.''
7. "The toxicology of synthetic chemicals is different from that of natural chemicals.'' This myth - not scientific evidence showing environmental harm or health dangers, since none exists - is at the heart of enviropropaganda for the ban of DDT. Ames and Gold quote the 1970 National Academy of Sciences report which concluded that "In little more than two decades DDT has prevented 500 million deaths due to malaria, that would otherwise have been inevitable.'' (Ames and Gold give this reference as National Academy of Sciences, U.S.A.,
The Life Sciences: Recent Progress and Application to Human Affairs, the World of Biological Research, Requirement for the Future, 1970, Committee on Research in the Life Sciences, Washington, DC, p 526.)Today (see Access to Energy 24, No. 12, p 4 for references), hundreds of millions of people suffer unnecessarily from malaria and one person (usually a child) dies every 12 seconds from this disease. Most of these deaths are the direct result of the baseless rationing of chemical technology by the United States government - the ban of DDT. The children we are killing, however, do not vote in our elections.
8. "Pesticides and other synthetic chemicals are disrupting hormones.'' The hormonal effects of ordinarily ingested natural chemicals are millions of times higher than for synthetic chemicals.
9. "Regulation of low, hypothetical risks is effective in advancing public health.'' Besides costing, by the Environmental Protection Agency's own estimate, about $140 billion per year, the regulation of low, hypothetical risks has raised the cost of healthful foods, diminished access to life enhancing and life saving technology, and caused the deaths of millions of people through rationing of needed chemicals. The greatest contribution to public health that could be made by the EPA would be for it and its regulations to be abolished.
The 86 references and 5 tables in this article by Ames and Gold (both of whom can be reached at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences Center, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720) are all the ammunition needed to demolish the myths about human environmental pollution and cancer.
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Vol. 25, No. 2
Newsletter: Access to Energy Newsletter Archive Volume: Issues Issue/No.: Vol. 25, No. 2 Date: October 01, 1997 02:53 PM Title: Shrinking to One Point
Copyright © 2004 - Access to Energy Newsletter Archive
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