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by revere, cross-posted from Effect Measure
If you have any of your clothes dry cleaned it’s more than likely you are being exposed to a chlorinated solvent called PCE (for perchloroethylene aka perc aka tetrachloroethylene/tetrachloroethene). You may be lucky enough to also get some in your drinking water, too (which means you are also breathing it and absorbing it through your skin) — because PCE is also one of the most prevalent groundwater contaminants in the US. It has some other nice properties: it causes cancer and birth defects and probably autoimmune disease. And it isn’t needed to dry clean clothes. Other than that, no problem. Under the heading of “elections matter”, though, consider this. After years of looking the other way, the Washington Post reports that EPA is moving — not rapidly, but moving — to make dry cleaners phase out PCE (perc):
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit issued a decision this week on legal challenges to OSHA’s 2006 rule to protect workers from exposure to hexavalent chromium. In the simpliest terms, Public Citizen’s Health Research Group and the Steelworkers argued that OSHA’s rule was not protective enough, while the Edison Electric Institute (EEI) argued that they should be exempt from it. The three-judge panel, which included retired U.S. Supreme Court judge Sandra Day O’Connor, rejected all but one of the petitioners’ claims, deferring largely to OSHA’s authority. Circuit Judge Rendell wrote:
“we will not disturb the Cr(VI) permissible exposure limit or other policy determination…as long as we conclude that OSHA’s decision was reasonably drawn from the record.”
Linda Reinstein is a mother and grandmother. Linda Reinstein is an asbestos-disease widow. Her husband Alan Reinstein, 67, died on May 22, 2006 from mesothelioma. Like her husband, Linda Reinstein is a fighter, an organizer, an activist. Following Alan Reinstein’s mesothelioma diagnosis in 2003, they founded the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization (ADAO) which is now entering its sixth year. The organization strives to serve as the “voice of the victims.”
Next month, the ADAO will host its 5th annual Asbestos Awareness Day conference (March 27-29, Manhattan Beach, California). Asbestos awareness in the year 2009? What does it say about the state of global and national public health when we still have the need for an Asbestos Awareness conference??
In 1971 under the National Cancer Act, Congresss authorized the 3-person President’s Cancer Panel which is charged with monitoring the “development and execution of the National Cancer Program” and preparing periodic progress reports for the President. Over the years, the Panel has examined quality of life for cancer patients, access to care issues, and lifestyle risk factors related to cancer. The Panel’s focus for 2008-2009 is “Cancer and the Environment,” a topic endorsed by The Collaborative on Health and Environment (CHE) and the topic of a draft consensus statement released by CHE.
The Panel’s first meeting on “Cancer and the Environment” was held on Sept 16, with 12 scientific experts making presentations at the public event. The speakers included Richard Clapp, D.Sc. of Boston University, Frank Mirer, PhD of Hunter College, Adam Finkel, Sc.D of UMDNJ (full statements provided below) and Devra Davis, PhD, Phil Landrigan, MD, Paul Shulte, PhD, David Kriebel, ScD, Jeanne Stellman, PhD, Christopher Portier, PhD, Jeanne Rizzo, RN, and Daniel Wartenberg, PhD. Read the rest of this entry »
I found the most curious item on OMB OIRA’s webpage today, and my paranoia about end-of-the-term mischief by the Bush Administration kicked into high gear. The item is listed as a proposed rule submitted to OIRA for review on July 7 titled:
“Requirements for DOL Agencies’ Assessment of Occupational Health Risks” (RIN: 1290-AA23) (Link here, select DOL) or (screenshot)
Whenever the term risk assessment is uttered by the Bush Admininstration, I know they are up to no good. Recall their earlier effort at a major overhaul of agency’s risk assessment procedures; this was a proposal that was long on new one-size-fits-all requirements for agencies involved in health, safety and environmental protection, but woefully lacking in details about the alleged problem it was designed to fix. More importantly, it would have added new steps to the rulemaking process, making a dysfunctional system more so, and creating administrative obstacles for health protective rules. Thankfully, a failing grade by the National Academy of Sciences forced OMB to junk it.
This mysterious draft proposal at OMB makes me wonder whether this is the White House’s plan B for so-called “reforms” to agency risk assessments. Let’s see: they couldn’t impose their requirements agency-wide, so why not target specific agencies? What better place than those pesky rules to protect workers’ from dangerous contaminants?
By Dick Clapp
There were two reviews of Devra Davis’s new book, The Secret History of the War on Cancer (Basic Books, 2007), published in Lancet journals last month. One was in the November 24 issue of the Lancet and the other was in the November issue of Lancet Oncology. They are so diametrically opposite that one wonders if the reviewers had read the same book. The Lancet review is by Peter Boyle, the current director of IARC (the International Agency for Research on Cancer) – an agency that is widely respected but whose recent report on attributable causes of cancer has raised some eyebrows among cancer researchers. Boyle’s review is a broadside against the book that starts with “Devotees of conspiracy theories and aficionados of gossip and innuendo will be drawn toward this book like wasps to a juicy piece of meat.” The review by Fred Pearce, a well-known environmental consultant and science writer, starts with “This is a clash of titans. Not between mankind and cancer so much as between the clinicians and chemical companies on one side, and the environmental and public health people on the other.”
Somehow, I missed Devra Davis’ powerful essay Off Target in the War on Cancer which appeared in the Washington Post last week. Davis, a well known environmental epidemiologist, is the author of the just published The Secret History of the War on Cancer. In the Post essay, she makes a very convincing case that there is much we can do to reduce cancer risk. While we don’t know all the answers, from a regulatory point-of-view its better to be safe than sorry:
Consider the icon of American cancer, the cyclist Lance Armstrong. He’s hardly alone as an inspiring younger survivor. Of the 10 million American cancer survivors who are alive five years after their diagnosis, about one in 10 is younger than 40. Could exposure to radiation and obesity-promoting chemicals help explain why, according to a study in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, the rates of the testicular cancer that Armstrong developed nearly doubled in most industrialized countries in the past three decades? Should we wait to find out?
Read the rest of this entry »
Devra Davis’s The Secret History of the War on Cancer is getting some wonderful, well-deserved reviews. Davis is a well-known an epidemiologist and director of the Center for Environmental Oncology at the University of Pittsburgh. Robin Mejia, in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, writes
The book is a must-read for those concerned about their own health or that of their loved ones. It’s also fascinating.
Mejia is right – the book is filled with fascinating historical material, linked with a focus on cancer prevention right now. To Davis, this means more than just promoting healthier lifestyles, but addressing the effects of the many chemicals we’re exposed to every day. Read the rest of this entry »
By Dick Clapp
Researchers devote a lot of effort to determining what causes cancer, and their findings can help us treat and prevent the disease. Industries that use and manufacture suspected carcinogens have something to fear, though, if research shows their products or processes to be contributing to cancer in workers or nearby communities. As a result, there has been a three-decade debate about the magnitude of the cancer burden contributed by these sources.
This issue is getting renewed attention because the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) recently released a report on “Attributable causes of cancer in France in year 2000.” This was a collaborative effort with the French Academy of Sciences, several other cancer-related agencies, and a distinguished international group of reviewers. It was begun in 2005 with the intention of updating the frequently-cited estimate of the attributable causes of cancer done by Doll and Peto in 1981, specifically as these estimates applied to France. The report reviews a large literature, goes through a long series of calculations and sensitivity analyses, and comes up with a set of conclusions remarkably similar to those of Doll and Peto’s estimates 26 years earlier. They attribute even smaller percentages of cancer due to occupation and “pollution” than did Doll and Peto.
The most surprising aspect of the new IARC report comes in the discussion section, though, where the authors suggest the possibility that low-dose environmental and occupational exposures might actually have decreased cancer incidence in France. In doing so, they invoke the notion of “hormesis.” Say what?
by Susan F. Wood, PhD
Today’s Washington Post writes about one more instance where women’s health and children’s health were a lower priority than the interests of a powerful group. In this case, it was breastfeeding vs. the formula industry.
Marc Kaufman and Christopher Lee write:
In an attempt to raise the nation’s historically low rate of breast-feeding, federal health officials commissioned an attention-grabbing advertising campaign a few years ago to convince mothers that their babies faced real health risks if they did not breast-feed. It featured striking photos of insulin syringes and asthma inhalers topped with rubber nipples.
Plans to run these blunt ads infuriated the politically powerful infant formula industry, which hired a former chairman of the Republican National Committee and a former top regulatory official to lobby the Health and Human Services Department. Not long afterward, department political appointees toned down the campaign.
The ads ran instead with more friendly images of dandelions and cherry-topped ice cream scoops, to dramatize how breast-feeding could help avert respiratory problems and obesity. In a February 2004 letter, the lobbyists told then-HHS Secretary Tommy G. Thompson they were “grateful” for his staff’s intervention to stop health officials from “scaring expectant mothers into breast-feeding,” and asked for help in scaling back more of the ads.
