What do cosmetics have in common with cellphones? They both worry a leading cancer scientist about their potential as health risks

Jan 15, 2008 04:30 AM
Nancy J. White
Living Reporter

First off, Devra Davis won't do the interview on her cellphone.

Call me back on the land line, she instructs. It's not the money she's concerned about. It's the microwaves.

She's also concerned about drinking diet pop, wearing a lot of cosmetics and eating non-organic red meat.

But make no mistake: she's not some trendy health-scare type. She's a blue-chip cancer epidemiologist, director of the Center for Environmental Oncology at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute with a Grade A scientific pedigree: a PhD from the University of Chicago, a decade at the National Academy of Sciences, an author of more than 170 published articles.

And she's worried about her environmental exposure to cancer.

"Everyone has to start where they're comfortable, taking control of their own homes," says Davis, who will be the keynote speaker at Women's College Hospital's health forum Friday. "Then they have to make sure they vote for politicians who understand the importance of this issue."

This issue is how we've let modern life, from the air we breathe to the products we use, poison our bodies.

"We've made remarkable progress in treating some forms of cancer," says Davis, 61. "But if we only improve our ability to find and treat the disease, without dealing with the underlying causes, we will not have made enough progress."

In her newest book, The Secret History of the War on Cancer, Davis argues that the long march against cancer has been misled too often by corporate interests and sidetracked by missed opportunities.

In 1936, more than 200 of the world's top cancer scientists convened in Brussels, a gathering of the best minds to create a new way forward in understanding and fighting the disease. When Davis unearthed the transcripts of those meetings, she was stunned to read how much those scientists knew about cancer's social and environmental causes.

Many widely used agents of the time, including ionizing and solar radiation, arsenic, benzene, asbestos, synthetic dyes and hormones, were recognized as cancerous in humans, she writes.

This knowledge came from researchers combining autopsies with medical, personal and workplace histories of cancer victims and conducting animal lab studies.

However, she says, these findings didn't seep into the mainstream medical practice of the day, due, in part, to the scant media coverage given scientific meetings back then. But mainly it was the timing, the brink of World War II. "The world had very different priorities," says Davis.

"Cancer is the ultimate long-term disease. To be concerned about cancer implies a certain optimism in the future."

In 1971, U.S. President Richard Nixon declared war on cancer, reflecting the idea that the type of ingenuity that built the A-bomb and put a man on the moon could wipe out cancer within the decade.

Rocket engineers from NASA held meetings with medical researchers, setting up charts with overlapping diagrams and lots of arrows, mapping out how the war on cancer should be conducted, writes Davis. Most serious researchers viewed the idea of a single cure as preposterous, a political fuss, she says.

The war did not take aim at any of the known or suspected carcinogens. Not even tobacco smoking, which the U.S. surgeon general had declared a cause of cancer in 1964.

"There were very close ties between the tobacco industry and, later the chemical industry, and the development of the war on cancer," she says.

Today, the emphasis is not so much on declaring war against cancer as it is dealing with a chronic condition, says Davis. "We need to make changes in the infrastructures of our lives that will help reduce the risks."

She's most worried about air pollution, such as emissions from coal-fired plants and growing vehicle traffic, that's distributed across the population. "It's important for people to understand that the burning of fossil fuels that's warming the Earth is the same process increasing our health risks, including cancer in the long term."

There are several other issues that concern her, particularly because health officials aren't paying much attention to them:

Cellphones – New data from Sweden, she says, show that people using cellphones for 10 years or more have double the risk of brain cancer. She's worried about kids under 16 glued to their cellphones. "Would you let your child play Russian roulette?" she asks.

Aspartame – The artificial sweetener's negative effects in animal studies occurred in the last third of the creatures' lives, which corresponds to human beings in their 60s to 80s. Again, she is especially concerned about children consuming the product over many decades.

The doses that induced cancer in animals, she says, were not especially high: about two cans of diet pop, two yogurts and a couple of sticks of gum a day.

Diagnostic radiation – The medical community is becoming increasingly concerned about unnecessary Computed Tomography scans of children, she writes. A CT scan of a child's stomach can be equivalent to 600 chest X-rays and one of an infant's head may equal a few thousand.

While a CT scan may well be warranted in a medical emergency, she says, repeated follow-up scans may not be a wise idea.

Ritalin – Several papers have indicated that Ritalin, valuable for treating Attention Deficit Disorder, might pose a risk to the user's genetic makeup, says Davis. In one study, researchers tested the blood of a dozen children before and after they were put on the drug, she writes, and found chromosome damage after three months' use.

Davis cautions that the numbers tested were small, no direct link to Ritalin was found and genetic damage and repair happens all the time. But given the widespread use of the drug in children, she says, governments and the private sector need to further investigate.

Overall, Davis believes the growing awareness of global climate change is sparking more concern about environmental health.

"The connection is obvious," she says.

"We only have one planet."