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THE CANCER WAR HOAX The economy may be slowing down, but the cancer industry is booming like never before. Cancer clinics are popping up all over Canada and the US like mushrooms on a dunghill. Some US entrepreneurs even have mammography vans on the road. Cancer victims are operated, radiated and medicated in increasing numbers. In the meantime people shave their heads, run for the cure, Cops for Cancer (Shouldn't that be Cops against Cancer?) cycle--all to raise money in the mistaken belief that money will buy a cancer cure. Anyone who believes that the war against cancer is being won is a daffodil dummy. The evidence that we are losing the battle against cancer is overwhelming: After decades of PR hoopla, phony promises, meaningless slogans, countless so-called medical breakthroughs and literally billions of dollars spent on research, the cancer cure predicted for the late seventies today has become a cancer epidemic. One does not have to be a genius to realize that if all that research had been effective and all those so-called medical breakthroughs had been true, both the incidence and the mortality rate of cancer would have declined significantly. The tragic reality, however, is that after research expenditures in the US alone of $30 billion during the past 25 years, twice as many people get and die of cancer today than did in 1971, an increase far beyond population growth (Dateline NBC Aug. 21, 1996). Breast cancer alone has more than doubled from one in 20 in 1970 to one in eight today. Prostate cancer is showing a simlar increase. Both have a mortality rate of about 30 per cent. About 40 per cent of Canadians and Americans get cancer and most (62.5 per cent) of these cancer victims die of it. Every day some 160 Canadians and about 1,500 Americans die of cancer. Cancer kills almost twice as many Canadians and Americans in a single year (+ 616,000) than World War II did in six (338,673). Worldwide cancer kills some six million people per year (All figures exclude non-melanoma skin cancer). These grim statistics are not only depressing, they also reveal the extreme gullibility of the millions of people who keep donating to the world's wealthiest disease clubs: the Canadian Cancer Society (CCS) and the American Cancer Society (ACS), despite the fact that neither has achieved its primary objective to reduce the incidence and mortality rate of cancer. If real progress in the battle against cancer had been made, fewer and fewer people would get and die of it. Since the reality is the opposite, the present strategy obviously is not working. What IS working are the thousands of people who profit from this dreadful disease, e.g. cancer society executives, researchers, radiologists, oncologists, pharmaceutical companies and so on. Indeed as Dr. Deepak Chopra has said: more people live off cancer than die of it. Cancer clearly is not only a deadly disease, but also a very profitable industry. While significant progress has been made with some forms of cancer, e.g. leukemia and Hodgkin's Disease, the much more common big killers such as lung, colorectal, prostate and breast cancer are claiming more victims every year. Lung cancer among women has quadrupled since 1970 and according to a recent study the incidence of prostate cancer is expected to double in the next 10 years. Despite all the fund-raising hype about the so-called progress
in cancer research, treatment and diagnosis, very little has
changed during the last few decades. Consider the facts: Surgery not infrequently results in the spreading of cancer cells to other parts of the body which then calls for radiation or chemotherapy and sometimes subsequent surgery. Radiation can kill cancer cells as well as create new ones. Like chemotherapy it seriously weakens the immune system, thereby subjecting the patient to the risk of other diseases, for example pneumonia. Chemotherapy injects highly toxic substances into cancer patients. Some forms of chemotherapy can actually CAUSE cancer, e.g. tamoxifen used to treat breast cancer can cause uterine cancer. DIAGNOSIS: diagnostic procedures may also pose serious risks unknown to patients. For example, mammography screening programs for pre-menopausal women. As Dr. Samuel Epstein points out in his book The Politics of Cancer: "The (U.S.) National Cancer Institute and other experts are now agreed that these (programs) are likely to cause more cancers than could possibly be detected." An article in the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet (January 8, 2000) states: "for every 1000 women screened biennially throughout 12 years, one breast-cancer death is avoided whereas the total number of deaths is increased by six." Women are commonly not told by their doctors that mammography subjects their breasts to radiation levels that can cause cancer. Moreover, mammography often instills a false sense of security in women when it fails to detect cancer, which happens between 15 to 20 per cent of the time. The incidence of breast cancer continues to increase at two per cent per year. Despite mammography and current treatment procedures, more women get and die of breast cancer now than ever before. The CCS, the ACS, the medical profession and even government departments claim mammography is safe. It is not. One government brochure claims it exposes a woman to no more radiation than a flight across Canada. Yet, at a 1994 breast cancer forum at the University of Victoria a radiologist presented figures that show radiation exposure of mammography may be as high as 100 chest x-rays or at least 1,000 times higher than claimed in the brochure, hence hardly without risk. It is not the only distorted information about cancer. Only with cancer are terms like five-year-survival rates used instead of a cure. Statistical sleight of hand conceals how many die AFTER five years. According to Dr. David Prescott and Dr. Abraham Flexer in their book Cancer: The Misguided Cell the figure is between 12 and 15 per cent. Moreover, since cancer depresses the immune system, many people die of other diseases, e.g. pneumonia. Their deaths often don't show up as cancer deaths in statistical records. The inescapable conclusion is that the so-called War on Cancer is an abysmal failure. Or as Two-time Nobel Prize winner Dr. Linus Pauling has described it: "largely a fraud." Most people still don't realize that the fight against cancer will never be won so long as we continue to pollute our air, water, soil and food with toxic contaminants. We are surrounded by carcinogens: PCB's, dioxins, vinyl chloride, various herbicides and pesticides and our blood samples prove we have absorbed many of these chemicals. Even municipal water supplies have been found to contain carcinogens. Electromagnetic energy has penetrated our society with high voltage power lines, cellular phones, microwaves and computers all suspected of causing an increase in cancer. X-rays, which can save your life, can also kill you: ionizing radiation is cumulative and carcinogenic. They should only be used when the benefits clearly outweigh the risks. There are no safe places left: the urban environment is increasingly polluted and a study by the National Cancer Institute in the U.S. shows that between 20 and 40 per cent of all cancer victims contract their disease at work. According to the World Health Organization (WHO) 80 per cent of all cancer is environmentally caused and thus preventable. Hence the emphasis should be on prevention instead of treatment. The reason it isn't is that expensive treatment and diagnostic procedures produce literally billions of dollars in profits and salaries, while prevention COSTS money. Prevention requires less pollution, healthier food, cleaner air and safer water, all of which translate into increased expenditures instead of increased profits and that simply doesn't look good on a corporation's balance sheet. While the CCS agrees that prevention is effective it spends less than five per cent of its budget on it and then only in the form of "education," such as brochures advising people not to smoke or sit in the sun too long. When the CCS can take direct action, it is strangely absent. For example, in the late seventies more than 100 organizations,
including the B.C. Medical Association, fought hard to keep uranium
mines out of British Columbia., recognizing that such mining
operations would increase the incidence of cancer. Nurses, teachers,
unions, churches and countless others banded together and succeeded
in forcing the B.C. Government to ban uranium exploration and
mining. But the CCS refused to join the opposition to this cancer-causing
industry stating the society is "non-political!" The most effective way to fight cancer is to prevent it and the best way to prevent it is to stop industry from contaminating our air, water, soil and food with carcinogens. As Dr. John Bailar of the Faculty of Medicine at McGill University has said: "The long history of research that has focussed almost exclusively on treatment has not produced the benefits we all hoped and expected to see. It's time to put the main emphasis on prevention instead of treatment." So long as governments allow industry to poison us, cancer will continue to increase the number of its victims and the profits of its beneficiaries. For more detailed information check the following web sites: http://members.shaw.ca/jmoelaert
(The Cancer Conspiracy. Be sure to check the site's archive
which contains many interesting items re the politics of cancer). |