A commentary by Linda Gasparello in White House Weekly on February 2, 2005, described ACSH's release of our book America's War on "Carcinogens": Reassessing The Use of Animal Tests to Predict Human Cancer Risk:
John Graham, the formidable regulatory tsar of the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), has been tossed a hot potato by a group of public health scientists who came to Washington last week to say it's time somebody in government did something to stop the seemingly endless scares about cancer which turn out to be wrong.
And they have provided him with, yes, a road map. It's in a slim new volume of research which highlights many of these scares, why they were wrong, and what needs to be done
As the former editor of a couple of food publications, I'm sympathetic. At one time, hardly a week went by without a new study claiming that whatever it was we were eating would probably give us cancer, or worse.
Then a year or two later, sometimes less, new studies would come out saying forget it, there's really no problem.
Remember the cranberry scare? The apple scare? The saccharin scare? Or, more recently, the sudden panics about French fries and farmed salmon? All wrong.
If you're the worrying sort, you should get hold of this book. It's guaranteed to make you feel better. Don't be put off by its rather ponderous title, America's War on "Carcinogens": Reassessing The Use of Animal Tests to Predict Human Cancer Risk. It's a compelling document, full of fascinating insights. I'd even suggest it be required reading for politicians, regulators, journalists and others who dabble in matters of health, food and the proper use of science.
The book was released in Washington last week by the American Council on Science and Health at a symposium in which its scientist authors focused on the need for what the council's president, Elizabeth Whelan, called "a sea change" in the way the government assesses cancer risks.
The major change they called for was for government scientists to be more scientific and less formulaic in their interpretation of animal experiments. The traditional assumption that anything that causes cancer in rats or mice at very high doses must ipso facto also cause cancer in people is now known to be seriously flawed, they argued.
Michael Bracken, professor of epidemiology and public health at Yale, put it this way: "The assumption that any chemical that causes cancer in animals must also be a human carcinogen has led to numerous false public health alarms and distracted and misled us from other more important public health risks."
This is not a new argument. It has been made before by such top cancer experts as Bruce Ames and Lois Gold at Berkeley, former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop and others whose views should command respect, including some 50 leading epidemiologists, toxicologists and other scientists -- many at leading universities -- involved with this report.
At last week's symposium, it was also noted that numerous government scientists at the National Cancer Institute, the Environmental Protection Agency and elsewhere agree that the critics are right and the present system for assessing cancer risks is broken.
So why haven't the necessary changes been made? Why are risk assessments still based on a discredited model?
As everyone in government knows, one of its most enduring operating principles is inertia -- the status quo. Change is difficult.
This new book, by pulling together an impressive body of evidence and the views of an important segment of the scientific community, may well provide the change that has been needed.
The council urges Congress and the National Cancer Institute to take the lead. But regulations based on false assumptions fall more naturally under the jurisdiction of OMB's office of information and regulatory affairs, where Graham has assembled a team of specialized scientists able to make these critical judgments.
The good news about this is that in future we may be hearing less about our favorite foods supposedly causing us to come down with cancer and more about the government getting the science right in the first place.
America's War on "Carcinogens" is available directly from the American Council on Science and Health, 1995 Broadway, New York, NY 10023. E-mail: acsh[at]acsh.org
