[Fwd: The Politics of Cancer]

[James McCarthy]

It is hardly perverse to suggest that skyrocketing rates of cancer in the
postwar U.S. are precisely a menace, and do demand a causal explanation. As
Paul Rosenburg's message points to, the increases in cancer are far beyond
any increases in life expectancy, and are occurring in all age groups.
Steingraber's book is excellent starting point on this topic. By the most
generous estimates of the federal government, average life expectancy in
the U.S. increased from about 68 years in 1950 to about 75 years in 1991 --
hardly enough to account for the 49.3% increase in the incidence of cancer
over the same period, or even the 35% rise if you exclude lung cancer. And
increasing life expectancy says nothing about the increases in cancers in
children and relatively young adults.

Of course we can't eliminate mortality. It's ridiculous to go from there to
saying that there's no point in worrying about or critically examining the
rise of pervasive carcinogens since WWII -- many of them peddled by MNCs
determined to develop domestic markets for products and technologies
originally developed for the U.S. military, btw. If the conviction that we
can do much better makes me a pessimist, so be it.


>I would have thought that the rise in cancer rates is precisely the
>changing profile of disease that comes with longer life expectancy. Many
>cancers, like breast cancer, prostrate cancer, are associated with what,
>to our ancestors, would have looked like old age.
>
>It is an irony of medicine that the diminution of such killers as
>influenza (though I was shocked to here that 3000 died from this in
>Britain this winter), TB and so on, leads to a greater preponderance of
>deaths from heart disease, cancer and so on. I guess the facts are that
>you can push the boundaries of mortality back, but you cannot abolish
>them.
>
>The reading of this changing profile of fatal disease that the rise in
>deaths from cancer need some kind of mechanical explanation, or worse
>still that this is some kind of new menace is perverse. A billboard here
>reads 'Britain's greatest killer is lurking in your chest'. It is about
>heart disease. But consider the mad interpretation that the heart is a
>killer. In fact it is the heart that gives you life. This is a problem
>of pessimism that sees the glass half empty, when really it's half-full.
>--
>Jim heartfield

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James McCarthy
Dept. of Geography
U.C. Berkeley
jpmgeog at socrates.berkeley.edu
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