Why are the British government and the big charities ignoring the environmental causes of cancer?
There is no notion so flawed that society will not, at some time, adopt it as a universal truth. Few misconceptions are as widespread as the idea that the war against cancer is being won. It's hardly surprising, for scarcely a week goes by without a promise that deliverance is just around the corner.
Yesterday, for example, we learnt that a new injection might cure lymphomas. The day before, the government announced that a further 90 million pounds would help to eliminate intestinal tumours. Cancer, most commentators agree, is all but dead.
So it's perplexing to discover that cancer in industrialised countries is not falling, but rising. While lung, cervical, uterine and stomach cancers are declining, and treatments for testicular cancer and childhood leukaemia have greatly improved, cancer overall has increased by 60% per cent in the last 50 years. Breast cancer has almost doubled. Prostate cancer has risen by 200%, testicular cancer in young men by 300%. In the US, childhood brain cancers and leukaemias have been advancing by 1.8% a year since 1973. In Britain, forty per cent of us are likely to contract cancer at some stage in our lives.
These increases are often ascribed to better detection and an ageing population. But the figures are age-adjusted: a 60 year-old today is 200 per cent more likely to contract prostate cancer than a 60 year-old would have been in 1950. Reported cancers have continued to rise after the universal deployment of new screening techniques: this is not an artefact of diagnosis. Cancer is thriving.
There is no notion so flawed that society will not, at some time, adopt it as a universal truth. Few misconceptions are as widespread as the idea that the war against cancer is being won. It's hardly surprising, for scarcely a week goes by without a promise that deliverance is just around the corner.
Yesterday, for example, we learnt that a new injection might cure lymphomas. The day before, the government announced that a further 90 million pounds would help to eliminate intestinal tumours. Cancer, most commentators agree, is all but dead.
So it's perplexing to discover that cancer in industrialised countries is not falling, but rising. While lung, cervical, uterine and stomach cancers are declining, and treatments for testicular cancer and childhood leukaemia have greatly improved, cancer overall has increased by 60% per cent in the last 50 years. Breast cancer has almost doubled. Prostate cancer has risen by 200%, testicular cancer in young men by 300%. In the US, childhood brain cancers and leukaemias have been advancing by 1.8% a year since 1973. In Britain, forty per cent of us are likely to contract cancer at some stage in our lives.
These increases are often ascribed to better detection and an ageing population. But the figures are age-adjusted: a 60 year-old today is 200 per cent more likely to contract prostate cancer than a 60 year-old would have been in 1950. Reported cancers have continued to rise after the universal deployment of new screening techniques: this is not an artefact of diagnosis. Cancer is thriving.