> In message <36AB795B.4B1A at gte.net>, Paul Henry Rosenberg <rad at gte.net>
> writes
>
> >The statistics she cites are uncontroversial. Her view that corporate
> >chemical pollution is a major cause *is* controversial. Her book is
> >pretty darn compelling, though.
>
> Not in my view. For sure the chemicals that we are exposed to will have
> an effect, but most of it is positive, like disinfectants and
> antibiotics. You would have to gas America to put a dent in the
> increased life expectancy due to those medical advances.
This is a red herring, mein herr. Steingraber isn't talking about chemicals used for such purposes. She's talking about the effects of chemical pollutants in the environment as part of the epidimology of cancer.
But, since you mention it, our rampant overuse of antibiotics (particular in livestock) is helping to bred new germs that are storming back at us something fierce. This is something that's an obvious hazard from an environmental perspective, which has been known about for a long time, but with nothing like an adequate response. Having an environmental perspective doesn't mean being anti-technology or anti-chemcial. It means being wise about how technology is deployed.
> More to the point, the desire to find a villain to blame for what is
> unavoidable, our mortality, is immature. I'm all for tackling specific
> problems of poisoning and health, but when somebody starts saying that
> our entire modern way of life is killing us, I tend to think that that
> is someone who lacks perspective.
And this is a straw man argument. No one is trying to find a villian to blame for our collective mortality.
Steingraber does indeed talk quite a bit about specific problems -- specific types of chemicals and how they circulate through the environment, as well as specific types of cancer, and how various chemicals can (or in some cases might) play a role in their development.
Furthermore, Steingraber does NOT argue that our entire modern way of life is killing us. She talks about how we can take specific actions to change things, both to identify safe vs. unsafe chemicals, and how to create a political context of human and civil rights to protect human life against corporate poisoning.
For example, she notes that the estimated number of carcinogens in commercial use is 3750 to 7500, but less than 200 are currently identified and regulated. That's a big problem of systemic corporate violations of basic rights.
This is where she comes to articulating human rights as a fundamental reference point. Instead of assuming that people will be exposed to life-threatening risks without their consent she says we should have an assumption of protection. That means that (1) anything that might increase risks has to be shown to be necessary, (2) the least toxic alternative should be employed, and (3) the effects should be understood ahead of time.
Would this slow down technological devlopment? Perhaps. But perhaps not. Perhaps it would vastly INCREASE it by making us think more comprehensively.
Anyway, that's academic. The immediate point is that pushing for such an approach would serve as another form of opposition to ruthless capitalist domination, and we can always use another one of those.
> Cancer, though not exclusively, is primarily a disease of
> later life so a relatively small increase in life expectancy
> could account for quite a large increase in cancers. Between
> the ages of 68 and 75 is about the time when a lot of people
> are diagnosed with cancer.
I already addressed this. Rates are going up for ALL age groups. Childhood cancer was already showing alarming increases in the late 1950s.
> Also, you have to be careful with
> your statistics, since these figures are presumably percentage
> increases in the incidence of cancer, not increases in the
> percentage of the population contracting cancer. If that sounds
> odd, I mean that a small original figure would register a large
> percentage increase with not many new cases.
Again, from *Living Downstream* -- (p 40) The absolute rate of cancer incidence was about 25%, now it is over 40% (38.3 for women, 482. for men). That's a LOT of new cases.
As I said before, all in all, it's a very interesting and compelling book. And unlike some, it's VERY well written. (She's a poet as well as PhD biologist, cancer survivor and political thinker.)
-- Paul Rosenberg Reason and Democracy rad at gte.net
"Let's put the information BACK into the information age!"