You have probably seen newspaper headlines that periodically try to reassure us that the tide of battle has turned, and that we are winning the war against cancer. One story from the New York Times in 2005 received much attention by claiming that “cancer statistics do not indicate a cancer epidemic,” and that “rates of cancer have been steadily dropping for 50 years.”¹

If only that newspaper account had been something other than wishful thinking! Even a casual reading of data provided by the National Cancer Institute paints a wholly different picture. As detailed in its “Cancer Statistics Review, 1975-2010,” while there has been a major decrease in the incidence of lung cancer (due to the reduction in smoking among men and, to a lesser extent, women), other categories of cancers reveal alarming increases over the past three decades:

• Thyroid cancer has increased by 145 percent.

• Acute childhood leukemia has increased by 24 percent.

• Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma has increased by 82 percent.

• Acute adult lymphocytic leukemia has increased by 67 percent.

• Testes cancer has increased by 60 percent.

• Childhood brain cancer has increased by 39 percent.

• Post-menopausal breast cancer has increased by 23 percent.

We’re losing the winnable war against cancer. Nearly one in every two men and more than one in every three women will be struck by cancer in their lifetime. That amounts to about 1.3 million people annually in the U.S., a population equal to that of Phoenix, Arizona. Another 550,000 die of cancer each year, a casualty toll comparable to the entire population of Denver, Colorado. Cancer has now literally become a disease of “mass destruction.”

As a health columnist for Rachel’s Health News commented a few years ago in describing the distorted lens through which the National Cancer Institute and the American Cancer Society, known as the “cancer establishment,” view cancer success: “As more people are kept alive each year with their breasts or testicles removed, the cancer establishment chalks up another ‘victory’—and no doubt the victims are glad to be alive—but we should acknowledge that there’s something very wrong with calling this a victory. Slash and burn seems more like a dreadful defeat.”²

The modern cancer epidemic cannot be explained away as a consequence of our increasing longevity, since incidence and mortality statistics are adjusted by a process known as “age-standardization” to take these trends into account. Nor can the epidemic be largely attributed to faulty personal lifestyle factors. Although smoking is clearly the single most important cause of cancer, as seen in the drop in lung cancer rates as smoking has decreased over the past few decades, the incidence of a wide range of cancers not related to smoking is increasing at disproportionately greater rates.

A 1990 survey of major industrialized nations, including the U.S., Britain and other European nations, and Japan, has shown that cancers not related to smoking are responsible for about 75 percent of the overall increased incidence of cancer since 1950.³ The survey concluded that “[i]n all the countries studied, mortality rates increased in persons over age 54 from cancer at some specific sites not related to cigarette smoking, including multiple myeloma, cancers of the breast, brain, and other central nervous system sites, and for all cancers except lung and stomach.” Contrary to general impressions, the ability to successfully treat most cancers, with the notable exceptions of thyroid and testicular cancers, has not substantially improved for decades.⁴

Neither can the role of high-fat diets be incriminated as a major cause of cancer, in sharp contrast to its clear role in heart disease. Breast cancer rates in Mediterranean countries are relatively low despite diets that contain up to 40 percent olive oil fat. Furthermore, epidemiological studies over the past two decades have consistently failed to establish any causal relationship between breast cancer and the consumption of fat per se, though meat and dairy fats heavily contaminated with carcinogenic pesticides and industrial pollutants do appear to play a role.

Finally, these increasing cancer rates also cannot be attributed to genetic factors. At most, genetics can be directly implicated as a cause in less than 10 percent of all cancers. Two studies published in the New England Journal of Medicine, in 1988 and 2000, illustrate the critical importance of environmental factors in cancer rates. In the first, adopted children whose adoptive parents died from cancer had a fivefold increased risk of developing the disease themselves, clearly implicating environmental exposures. In the second study, which compared 9,000 identical twins in Sweden, Denmark, and Finland, the authors reached this firm conclusion: “The overwhelming contribution to the causation of cancer in the population of twins that we studied was the environment.”⁵ In contrast, a strong body of scientific evidence demonstrates that, apart from carcinogenic ingredients in consumer products, the predominant cause of the modern cancer epidemic is directly related to petrochemical and nuclear industry technologies and their environmental pollutants.

The explosive growth of industrial technologies since the 1940s has, to varying degrees in different nations, outstripped the development of legislative and regulatory controls. About 800 of the estimated 80,000 industrial chemicals in current U.S. use have been shown to be carcinogenic, based on National Toxicology Program tests and evaluation by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC). Our total environment—the air we breathe, the water we drink and bathe in, the places we work, the prescription drugs we take, and the consumer products we buy, including food, household products, and especially cosmetics and personal-care products—has become pervasively contaminated with a multitude of industrial carcinogens. As a consequence, the public-at-large continues to be unknowingly exposed to a wide range of avoidable carcinogens.

In addition to carcinogenic effects, these exposures can induce allergenic, reproductive, genetic, neurological, and immunological effects. Unfortunately, we have no systematic data on their incidence and related mortality trends as is the case with cancer. However, cancer does represent a quantifiable way of measuring the range of adverse public health and environmental impacts that result from runaway industrial technologies. This means that a reduction in cancer rates will also, most likely, be paralleled by a reduction in the incidence of other chronic environmentally induced diseases.

The Folly of “Damage Control”

Cancer statistics reflect the fact that the policies of the federal National Cancer Institute (NCI), funded by tax payers, and the non-profit American Cancer Society (ACS), funded by public and also a wide range of industry donations, are fixated on damage control. They spend most of their budgets on diagnosis, treatment, and treatment-related research rather than on prevention research and action. Despite more than $50 billion in expenditures of taxpayer money by the NCI since President Nixon first declared war on cancer in 1971, less than 2 percent of its budget has gone to cancer prevention. Not surprisingly, overall mortality rates have remained virtually unchanged.

Over the past decades, we have seen the NCI and ACS, hand in hand, issue numerous breathless assurances, eagerly trumpeted by the uncritical news media, that breakthroughs in the war against cancer and in cancer treatment were imminent. In the early years of the “war,” the NCI and ACS promised a cure in time for the nation’s 1976 bicentennial. Then, in 1984, and again in 1986, the NCI declared that cancer mortality would be cut in half by the year 2000. Both agencies announced in 1998 that the nation “had turned the corner” in the cancer war and that precipitous drops in mortality would soon occur. None of these predictions have come true—or even close to it.

The FDA, NCI, and ACS spend millions of dollars on public relations in attempts to reassure the public they are doing a good job, despite their lack of progress. The reason they’ve failed to make any headway against cancer is this very fixation on damage control over cancer prevention.⁶ These and other concerns relating to fiscal malpractice led the Chronicle of Philanthropy, the authoritative U.S. charity watchdog, to charge that the ACS is “more interested in accumulating wealth than saving lives.”⁷

ACS allocations for prevention, primarily tobacco cessation programs and low-fat diets, are only about 0.1 percent of its budget of about $1 billion annually. NCI’s budgetary allocation for prevention of occupational cancer (cancer due to exposure to chemical carcinogens in the workplace), the most avoidable of all cancers and conservatively estimated to be responsible for about 10 percent of all U.S. cancer deaths in adults and children, is about 1 percent.⁸ The budget for research on and outreach to African Americans and other ethnic minorities, with their disproportionately high cancer rates, is also about 1 percent of NCI’s budget; allocations for all primary prevention activities are well under 5 percent of its total budget.

Further undermining the goal of reducing the incidence of cancer, the NCI’s definition of what constitutes prevention is so narrowly defined that it trivializes the major avoidable causes of cancer posed by contaminants in our air, water, workplaces, and consumer products. Instead, the NCI largely blames faulty lifestyle habits, particularly inactivity, lack of exercise, obesity, and faulty diet.

The U.S. cancer establishment’s professional mindset and politically misshapen priorities are compounded by disturbing conflicts of interest, particularly for the ACS, because of its relationships with the cancer drug industry, as well as with the petrochemical and other polluting industries. As a previous director of the NCI, Dr. Samuel Broder, admitted, the NCI has become “what amounts to a governmental pharmaceutical company.”⁶ That mindset has contributed over the last four decades to the NCI’s tendency to trumpet almost every new “miracle” or “magic bullet” cancer drug as the latest evidence that the “tide is turning” in the cancer war.

To make matters worse, the U.S. cancer establishment has failed to provide Congress, federal regulatory agencies (particularly the Food and Drug Administration [FDA], Environmental Protection Agency [EPA], and Occupational Safety and Health Administration [OSHA]), and even more importantly, the public, with well-documented scientific information on how to avoid causes of cancer, other than pointing to lifestyle faults. That information exists but remains buried in government and industry files and in scientific literature that is virtually inaccessible to, or not made available to, the general public. That is the major reason why legislative and regulatory action has not yet been taken to reduce or ban these avoidable cancer causes and why the public continues to be denied its fundamental right to know of such information.

The cancer establishments worldwide still rely on questionable data and biased claims from publicly funded institutional apologists for the status quo and academics working for the very industries they should be exposing. A blatant example was Britain’s late Sir Richard Doll, a leading expert on the avoidable causes of cancer in his early career. However, for subsequent decades Doll was employed as a closet industry consultant. He trivialized escalating ratios of cancer, explaining them away by blaming the victims and their life-styles. This was coupled with his “guesstimates” that pollution and industrial products account for only 3 percent of cancer mortality.⁹ Doll was also virtually unique in his insistence that leaded petroleum, low-level radiation, diesel exhaust, radiation from atom bomb tests, and environmental pollutants didn’t pose any significant cancer risk. This gross misrepresentation no doubt reflected his professional involvement with a wide range of asbestos, petrochemical, and other industries. It should, however, be noted that in 2002, shortly before his death, Doll finally admitted that most cancers, other than those related to smoking and hormones, “are induced by exposure to chemicals, often environmental.”¹⁰

The worldwide cancer establishments share major responsibility for losing the winnable war against cancer, a fact that is all the more serious in view of the strong influence that U.S. cancer establishment policies continue to exert on other nations worldwide. The mainstream media also share major responsibility, breathlessly and uncritically greeting every new claim of “magic bullet” cancer cures as new triumphs in the war on cancer and reacting to well-documented scientific evidence on the avoidable causes of cancer with limited or critical treatment.

Cancer Risks from Smoking Versus Personal-Care Product Use

Let’s return for a moment to smoking and its relation to cancer risk, to help us better understand the pervasiveness and severity of the health threat posed by toxic chemicals in our cosmetics and personal-care products. Smoking in the U.S. and most major industrialized nations, outside of Asia, has been increasingly restricted to lower socioeconomic groups. The use of cosmetics and personal-care products, in contrast, spans all income and racial groups. Moreover, smoking is uncommon prior to adolescence (though children may be exposed to secondhand smoke), whereas direct exposure to personal-care products begins in infancy and even in the embryo, when sensitivity to carcinogens is most acute.

Another key difference is that smoking, at least before addiction kicks in, is a voluntary act—smokers know that smoking is dangerous and choose to assume the risk anyway. This risk is even emphasized by explicit cigarette warning labels. However, there is no such warning at all for the worldwide users of cosmetics and personal-care products.

Evidence for the carcinogenicity of cigarette smoke is largely and persuasively based on epidemiological studies comparing lung cancer and other cancer rates in non-smokers and smokers. While the chemistry of cigarette smoke and of cosmetics and personal-care products is very different, several of the same carcinogens have been identified in both, including formaldehyde, nitrosodiethanolamine, arsenic, DDT, and Endrin.

The strong epidemiological evidence on the risks of smoking is based on comparisons of cancer rates in large population groups that smoke different amounts of cigarettes daily, over different periods of time, with those in groups that have never smoked. Such comparisons are not feasible for most cosmetics and personal-care products because their use is virtually universal in the U.S. and most other industrialized nations. There are only two notable exceptions—instances in which it was possible to define exposed and non-exposed population groups. As documented in a November 17, 1994, Cancer Prevention Coalition Citizen’s Petition to the FDA and an accompanying press release, “Dusting With Cancer,” major risks of ovarian cancer have been identified in women who use talc-dusted tampons. As well, higher rates of multiple myeloma, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, leukemia, and bladder cancers have been identified in women who regularly use black or dark brown permanent or semi-permanent hair dyes.

While smoking tobacco is the single most important cause of cancer, causes of cancer not related to smoking still account for about 75 percent of the increased incidence of cancer in the U.S. and other major industrialized nations since the 1950s.¹¹ It’s very likely cosmetics and personal-care products are a significant part of that. Yet, there are striking differences between smoking and cosmetics and personal-care products when it comes to regulation: whereas cigarettes are heavily regulated, including via warning labels, cosmetics and personal-care products remain virtually unregulated.

The following facts should be unarguable:

• The incidence of cancer in the U.S., Canada, Britain, Japan, and other major industrialized nations has escalated to epidemic proportions over recent decades.

• Consumers are unknowingly exposed to carcinogenic ingredients and contaminants through mainstream industry cosmetics and personal-care products, along with food and household products.

• Cosmetics and personal-care products—usually applied to large areas of the skin daily—are, to varying degrees, contaminated with dozens of carcinogens.

For nearly four decades we have been losing the winnable war on cancer because we have relied on the highly biased cancer establishment, which is overwhelmingly focused on damage control—diagnosis and treatment—and gives prevention only the most minimal priority. The cancer epidemic can still be arrested and reversed, but we must develop new strategies that make prevention a more urgent goal than damage control. An essential first step in this process is for consumers to educate themselves about how they can undertake their own cancer prevention strategies, with particular regard to cosmetics and personal-care products, using the information in this book. And as we see in the next chapter, that depends on reestablishing our unarguable right to know the identity of hidden dangers in all products.