It is difficult to believe this is still open to discussion. We have already discussed this matter with, Monsanto, pcb, Niagra Falls, the inability to eat fish caught in United States rivers and lakes, etc.

The real problem here is not the lack of scientific study but the absolute lack of government protection of its citizens and the wholesale feeding of the public to corporations. If there is a problem, this is the problem. This government, supposedly by and for the people, has been protecting corporate interest and leaving the public exposed to corporate predators. The sad part about all of this is that corporate managers breathe the same air, drink the same water and eat the same food as the rest of us. I can only think the managers justify their thinking because they can afford better health care in the event their poor public policy causes them or one of their loved ones to get cancer.

We are our brothers keepers in more ways than one. The failure of the government to monitor chemical waste and insist on pollution clean up is irresponsible, at best.

No doubt there is pollution. No doubt some of it is dangerous and potentially fatal. No doubt we should avoid selling out to the big corporations and clean up the messes they create. But, there's a major problem with the book's premise that chemical-caused cancers are out of control--we monitor cancer rates and they are actually down. To not acknowledge this point casts considerable doubt on the author's reliability. Is this a fair look at the situation or just another case of somebody screaming "the sky is falling" to get some attention?

The rate of cancer is not coming down.

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The rate of one type of cancer - hormone-receptor-positive breast cancer - is coming down, because women are largely aware of the link that was proven earlier in the decade between that form of cancer and hormone replacement therapies, and so fewer of them are opting to take hormones at menopause.

There's hope on the horizon for a family of cancers caused by HPV. But the HPV vaccine hasn't really produced a drop yet. It's only effective in women who have not yet been exposed to HPV, which means girls who have not been sexually active, for the most part. It will take decades for rates for HPV-caused cancers to drop.

For most cancers, though, and for cancer in the aggregate, the trend is upward with minor blips. Right now, in the US, women have a greater than 1 in 3 chance of contracting cancer during their lifetimes. For men it's nearly 1 in 2. And it's rising for both men and women, in spite of advances for specific cancers. An awful lot of us are going to get this disease.

Before industrialization, cancer was not a leading cause of illness and mortality. It drew attention because it was a horrible way to die, not because it was common.

It's common now. And while radiation, viruses, and bacteria can be shown to have an effect, it's industrially-produced carcinogens - and longer life-spans for genetic damage to manifest as cancer - which have driven cancer to prominence.

Which brings me to a sad point: the American Cancer Society, which rakes in large amounts of largess from big corporations, has nothing much to say about toxic carcinogens in air, food, water, beverages, furniture, plastics, and pretty near everything else. Instead they act like a mouthpiece for industry. Treatment is on-topic at the ACS. Prevention is not. They not only refuse to go after toxic industries, they refuse to talk about them.

It's absolutely true that the US government has abdicated in its role as a regulator in the public interest. So much so, that many American corporations run dual assembly lines for their products: one which meet more stringent European Union regulatory requirements, which prohibit many toxic carcinogens in products, and lax US standards, which do not.

Lax regulation is easily explainable. At the FDA, for example, advisory panels, which make product safety recommendations the FDA nearly always rubber-stamps, are under rules which permit advisors to take money from the very industries they are overseeing. If your day job is advising Monsanto, odds are you aren't going to go up against them when their products are under review. This has been demonstrated to be the case in peer-reviewed studies of advisory voting; if those advisors who were paid by industry were recused, many, many products on the market now would be banned.

When I was a young man in the early 1970's, the search for a cure for cancer was on everyone's mind. Science was working on it. It would just be a matter of time before we knew what was causing it and could solve it.

Today there is no longer any doubt what drives most cancers. Studies answering that question are literally legion. Look no further than the couch you bought which exudes formaldehyde, or the diet soft drink which contains caffeine and aspartame, both proven carcinogens, or the food dyes and preservatives used in industrially-processed foods. There are hundreds of known carcinogens on the FDA's approved food additives list.

Toxins are driving more than cancer rates: they are likely to blame for some mental disorders (such as attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder) and other illnesses which have been on the rise over the past century.

It's a safe bet that if we apply serious regulation to industry, cancer will recede as a threat. The gains will be gradual; we've dumped so many toxins that groundwater and soil and households will be affected for many decades, perhaps centuries. But at least we'll get the trends moving in the right direction.

There is no longer any mystery about what causes cancer. The only mystery is how long it will take for the American public to force its government to take action.

Just to clarify, I was speaking of cancer rates in the U.S., while the article posted above deals with rates worldwide. I'm not saying we should ignore the world rates, but the book (at least according to the review) seems to center on this being a rising problem in the U.S., as all the examples are here and it talks about the need for more lawsuits and government involvement which obviously wouldn't have any impact on the world as a whole.

Numbers can be found at the following site <link> or by doing a Google search on "US cancer rates falling."

Given the worldwide statistics, it's fair to question why the book seems more interested in the U.S., where we have environmental regulations and a variety of testing mechanisms in place, as opposed to other parts of the world where there are no regulations or safeguards whatsoever. Instinctively, you know that would be where the biggest problems will be.