The report, entitled Reducing Environmental Cancer Risk: What We Can Do Now, claims that cancers resulting from environmental factors could be “grossly underestimated”, adding that there are about 80,000 commercially available artificial chemicals in use in the United States, but few of them are regulated.
In a cover letter addressed to President Obama, the panel wrote: “The Panel urges you most strongly to use the power of your office to remove the carcinogens and other toxins from our food, water, and air that needlessly increase health care costs, cripple our Nation’s productivity, and devastate American lives.”
Normally there are three people on the President’s Cancer Panel, but at the moment there are two: Dr. LaSalle Leffall, an oncologist and professor of surgery at Howard University, and Dr. Margaret Kripke, an immunologist at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. Both were appointed by the George W. Bush administration.
They said there is a “growing body of evidence linking environmental exposures to cancer” and that “children are far more vulnerable to environmental toxins and radiation than adults.”
That is not to say that all chemicals are carcinogenic, but that there is currently not enough evidence one way or another. The report blames a system in which chemicals are presumed to be safe unless strong evidence emerges to the contrary.
Despite uncertainties about specific chemicals, the report put forward recommendations of actions people can take to reduce their risk of exposure.
These included choosing foods grown without pesticides or chemical fertilizers and washing conventionally grown foods before consumption; eating free-range meat to avoid exposure to antibiotics, growth hormones and toxic run-off from feed lots; avoiding processed, charred and well-done meats; microwaving food in glass or ceramic containers instead of plastic; and drinking filtered tap water instead of bottled water.
However, the American Cancer Society has criticized the report, saying that it overstates the risks.
An epidemiologist for the Cancer Society Dr. Michael Thun said in a statement that the report was “unbalanced by its implication that pollution is the major cause of cancer, and by its dismissal of cancer prevention efforts aimed at the major known causes of cancer…as “focused narrowly.””
He also said that the report’s conclusion – that the effect of pollution has been “grossly underestimated” – is provocative in that it restates one side of an ongoing scientific debate as though it were fact.
However, he added that the Cancer Society does agree with some of the main points of the report, namely, that there are too many synthetic chemicals in the food chain, that many have not been adequately tested, and that children could be more susceptible to harm.
The full report is available online here.