"Licensed to Ill"
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| (Photo courtesy USA Today) |
I am not usually one to be affected by celebrity events. I
tend to treat these “momentous” celebrity news stories with an eye roll and an
angry rant about all of the important news in the world being supplanted by the
trivial. But oddly, the reports yesterday of the death of Beastie Boys’ Adam
Yauch hit me hard. I could not understand why at first. Sure, I grew to like
the Beasties, after forgiving them for their peppy frat-boy (yet admittedly
funny) tunes of the mid-eighties. As a diehard music fan, particularly in my
20s, I know I saw them live at least once during what now in my mind is a blurry
haze of my concert-going days. I distinctly recall the throngs of tens of
thousands of Beasties fans jumping up and down in unison at one of the Tibetan
Freedom Concerts that Yauch organized in Washington,
D.C. Nevertheless, why was I
moved by the death of a rich, famous musician I did not know and of whom I was
merely a casual follower? One word: Cancer.
My generation, X, comprise the population aged from roughly
early to mid thirties, to about fifty. That age range corresponds quite closely
with the age at which cancer has seemed to first strike at many people I know. When
my parents and grandparents were that age, they knew few if any people who had
suffered or perished from the disease. Yet, beginning six years ago with the
untimely deaths of my childhood neighbor as well as my dear college friend, the
number of my peers living through and dying of cancer has surpassed the fingers
I have on which to count them. Of course, my anecdotal evidence of increasing
rates of cancer in my age group is not enough to prove a trend. As a trained
scientist, I know that a systematic gathering of unbiased data needs to occur
to provide true evidence of anomalous rates of cancer in aging Gen Xers. But I
also know that gathering reliable data of such trends is difficult.
Obtaining precise records of cancer incidence and potential
causal factors associated with the disease is nearly impossible given our
record keeping methods. Barring immoral human disease experimentation (such as
the horrendous Tuskegee
incident), public health researchers must rely on retrospective studies to
derive data. They must have medical records of patients that take into account
all potential causal factors related to disease, and/or create questionnaires
which account for all possible variables. If any data is inaccurate or
incomplete, as it always is, few valid results may be obtained. Questions that
may implicate environmental exposures are rarely asked of patients, often because
our society does not wish to connect the dots between our
"convenient" lifestyle and its consequences. We would rather blame
victims of cancer than those who introduce cancer-inducing pollutants into our
environment and our bodies. I know this not only as a scientist, but as a
cancer sufferer myself.
The conventional wisdom about cancer, echoed in doctors’
offices throughout the country, is that one contracts a tumor either from detrimental
personal lifestyle choices and/or from defective inherited genes which render
one more “susceptible” to the disease. Let us destroy both of these myths once
and for all.
First, lifestyle factors such as poor food choices or lack
of exercise are only tangentially tied to cancer. There may be some
correlation, but certainly no causations, unless one speaks of food tainted with
carcinogenic substances. While eating a nutritious diet, exercising regularly,
and maintaining a normal body weight may certainly help you - especially
because many carcinogens accumulate in fat tissue, and healthful foods can
increase the immune response - these factors are not enough in and of
themselves to significantly reduce cancer rates in a population living in an
environment rife with carcinogens.
Second, though DNA certainly plays an inextricable role in
carcinogenesis, as cancer is derived from the mutations of DNA, inheritance is
only peripherally related to the disease. The inheritance of “susceptibility”
is merely relevant if one is exposed to carcinogenic agents. Even in the most
studied cancer susceptibility genes, BRCA1 and BRCA2 (for breast cancer), women
with the gene who were born before 1940 are shown to have little increased risk
of cancer while those born after 1940 have a much greater risk.[i] So
what is the difference between these two groups of women? The limiting factor
that determines increased susceptibility is not the gene itself, but the
exposure to carcinogens. Women with the same "cancer" genes born
before World War II, before the widespread, common usage of tens of thousands
of synthetic chemicals, have a far lesser chance of being diagnosed with cancer
than their younger counterparts. Moreover, inherited lethal or highly
problematic genetic diseases tend to be rare in populations. But as of 2004,
one in three Americans will be diagnosed with cancer; it is the second leading
cause of death in the United
States. As natural selection – the
cornerstone of evolution, which is the principle theory in all of biology –
tells us, any highly deleterious or fatal gene will decrease in the population
rather than increase. Cancer rates have increased exponentially over the past
century or more, which is incompatible with the notion that the presence of
widespread cancer today is due to mere heredity.
Rather than focus upon the plethora – over 100,000 – of
synthetic chemicals in our air, water, food, and general surroundings, rather
than recall the many that are classified as potential or known carcinogens,
rather than recognize that most of these hundreds of thousands of chemicals are
completely unregulated and untested for health effects, and rather than ask
patients about their potential exposures to such toxic substances when
diagnosing patients with cancer, doctors revert to the standard pat question:
“Do you have a family history of cancer?” To be fair, physicians are rarely if ever
trained in environmental toxicology or environmental health; they rarely if
ever seek root causes of disease, let alone etiologies related to environmental
toxins. Even if they were to try to do so, honing in on one carcinogen among
the thousands or more to which we have all been exposed and carry within our
bodies would, in most cases, prove to be a feckless task.
I grew up along the Hudson River in northern Westchester County, NY.
Unbeknownst to me at the time, the river in which I waded and swam had been
deemed the largest Superfund site in the nation due to PCBs dumped into it decades ago by General
Electric. For sixteen years I lived on this river, less than two miles from the
Indian Point nuclear power plant, which has been leaking low levels of
radioactive substances for years. Furthermore, I spent a decade in D.C.
drinking highly chlorinated tap water, the byproducts of which are linked to colorectal
cancer. I also spent six years in smog and air-particulate-laden Los Angeles. Any of these
exposures, in addition to exposures from consumer and cosmetic products that I
utilized throughout my life, as well as from the radiation I received via routine
dental and chest X-rays, and other non-routine medical radiation diagnostic
procedures, could have contributed to my own cancer diagnosis. Unless one endures
a sustained exposure to one highly concentrated known carcinogen, such as might
occur in an occupational environment, cancer remains relatively untraceable due
to the ubiquity of carcinogenic agents in our environment. What better way to
prevent the tracking of responsibility to the specific culprits of the disease?
(Deliberate “Sabotage?”)
I was diagnosed with colon cancer almost four years ago now,
during a two-year stint in North
Dakota. Not once did anyone ask me about where I had
been born, where I had lived, or to what I may have been exposed. Given these
circumstances, surely no accurate record of any variables related to my
diagnosis exist. Thus, any public health study on cancer that might include me
would be missing innumerable pieces of key data. Besides asking about my family
(most of whom had never had cancer, and certainly not at my young age), my
medical practitioners did not delve into my cancer causes at all. They merely
kept repeating “what a fluke” my cancer was in such an otherwise healthy young
woman with no medical history of anything whatsoever. The experience of friends
and peers in the few years prior and since then would appear to confirm the
ignorance of such a statement.
Adam Yauch had a handful of years on me, yet still had far
too many left ahead to be lost so soon to such a disease. Though I of course
know nothing of his situation, I would wager a guess that his doctors also reassured
his family that his cancer was merely a fluke of nature, a random misfortune in
an otherwise healthy man. Only a willfully ignorant society in utter denial
could tolerate statements that demonstrate such a callous disregard of all that
is obvious. We are all somewhat complicit as we remain complacent in the face
of such overwhelming evidence of the detrimental effects of our polluted civilization.
The randomness of cancer is highly overstated. We who suffer it are victims of
a toxic environment created by an utterly toxic culture. Cancer is less an
arbitrary occurrence than an inevitability. It would seem that as the title of
the Beastie Boys debut album states, our industrial capitalist society has been
fully "Licensed to Ill."
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