“EPA’s study indicated that there is no safe level of dioxin exposure and that any dose no matter how low can result in health damage,” admitted the 1994 MBD advisory to the Chlorine Chemistry Council. “New findings on the mechanism of dioxin toxicity show that tiny doses of dioxin disrupt the action of the body’s natural hormones and other biochemicals, leading to complex and severe effects including cancer, feminization of males and reduced sperm counts, endometriosis and reproductive impairment in females, birth defects, impaired intellectual development in children, and impaired immune defense against infectious disease. . . . Further, dioxin is so persistent that even small releases build up over time in the environment and in the human body.”27
Some of the strongest concerns about the effect of endocrine-disrupting chemicals have come from observations of their effect on wildlife. In California, ecologists have found an abnormally high ratio of female to male seagulls. In polluted parts of Florida, panthers have un-descended testicles and endocrinologists have observed abnormally small or deformed penises in alligators near a former Superfund pollution cleanup site. In Great Britain, biochemists have noticed “hermaphroditic” fish with both male and female genitals breeding in wastewater effluent. Arctic seals and polar bears have shown declining fertility. In humans, a series of studies have shown an alarming decrease in male sperm counts in different parts of the world, which have plummeted to half the level found 60 years ago.
Researchers have been able to replicate many of these effects in laboratory experiments with captive animals. At the University of California at Davis, toxicologist Michael Fry found that injecting the eggs of seagulls with DDT would cause ferminization of the testes tissue in baby male gulls and result in sterile adults. In one study, 79 percent of monkeys exposed to dioxin developed endometriosis (the development of endometrial tissue in females in places where it is not normally present).
Chlorine Plus Carbon
What DDT, DES, dioxin, and PCBs all have in common, along with many other endocrine-disrupting solvents and pesticides, is that they belong to a class of chemicals called organochlorines—organic compounds containing chlorine bonded to carbon. In nature, chlorine makes up less than 0.2 percent of all chemicals, but some 15,000 organochlorines are now commercially manufactured and marketed, and approximately half of the endocrine disruptors identified to date have been organochlorines. “This doesn’t mean that all chlorine compounds behave the same way, but virtually every organochlorine that’s ever been tested has been found to cause at least one significant adverse effect,” says biologist Joe Thornton, the author of Pandora’s Poison: Chlorine, Health and a New Environmental Strategy. 28 Although organochlorines are rare in nature, they are produced in the manufacture of pesticides, herbicides, petrochemicals, plastics, and paper. They wind up in such common products as household cleaners, plastic wraps, food containers, children’s toys, compact disks, car doors, tennis shoes, and TV sets. Chlorinated chemicals are also introduced into water as a result of pulp and paper bleaching and through the use of chlorine to treat sewage and disinfect drinking water.
Chlorine-based chemicals are valued in the commercial world because they retain their potency for long periods of time. This very durability, however, also means that they remain in the environment for a long time after they have been released. DDT, for example, continues to accumulate to alarming levels in the fatty tissues of Great Lakes fish nearly a generation after its use was banned in the United States. Likewise, PCBs are still ubiquitous in the environment despite having been banned in 1976 because of links to human cancer.
Given the expense and difficulty involved in individually testing each of the 15,000 organochlorines currently in use, many environmental groups believe that this is a case where the precautionary principle should apply. Rather than assuming that each chemical is safe until it is proven otherwise, they believe that industry should bear the burden of proving a chemical’s safety or else find a safer alternative. Greenpeace has called for a 30-year phaseout of organochlorines. In addition to environmental groups, a number of governmental and other organizations have reached similar conclusions:• The International Joint Commission on the Great Lakes (IJC) is an environmental policy group organized by the U.S. and Canadian governments that focuses on the Great Lakes region. In 1986, the IJC’s science advisory board drew up a list of 362 toxic compounds found in the Great Lakes and noted that at least half of these were chlorinated chemicals. In 1992, it recommended phasing out the use of chlorine and chlorine-containing industrial feedstocks as part of an effort to restore and protect the Great Lakes ecosystem.
• In October 1993, the American Public Health Association (one of the groups targeted as a potential ally in Ketchum’s PR plan for the Clorox Company) called for the eventual elimination of chlorine-based bleaches in the paper and pulp industry. In March 1994, the APHA called on industry to reduce or eliminate chlorinated organic compounds and processes and to introduce lower-risk alternatives. “Virtually all chlorinated organic compounds that have been studied exhibit at least one of a wide range of serious toxic effects such as endocrine dysfunction, developmental impairment, birth defects, reproductive dysfunction and infertility, immunosuppression, and cancer, often at extremely low doses,” it noted in a policy statement.29
• The Paris Commission on the North Atlantic, representing 15 European governments and the European Community, has recommended that emissions of chlorine-containing compounds be reduced and that European governments adopt programs to phase out their use.
Don’t Say Maybe, Baby
The debate over endocrine disruptors was first introduced to a popular audience with the 1996 publication of Our Stolen Future by authors Theo Colborn, Dianne Dumanoski, and Pete Myers. Our Stolen Future acknowledged the difficulties and the limited knowledge that currently surrounds the theory of endocrine disruptors. “Because of our poor understanding of what causes breast cancer and significant uncertainties about exposure, it may take some time to satisfactorily test the hypothesis and discover whether synthetic chemicals are contributing to rising breast cancer rates,” they stated, adding that “the magnitude of this threat to human health and well-being is as yet unclear.”30
Given the unanswered questions that still exist and the serious potential harm that may be caused by endocrine disruptors, Colborn, Dumanoski, and Myers recommended further research, coupled with efforts to minimize unnecessary chemical exposures. Like Greenpeace, their position was based partly on emerging science and partly on the precautionary principle. “Shift the burden of proof to chemical manufacturers,” they urged. “To a disturbing degree, the current system assumes that chemicals are innocent until proven guilty. This is wrong. The burden of proof should work the opposite way, because the current approach, a presumption of innocence, has time and again made people sick and damaged ecosystems. We are convinced that emerging evidence about hormonally active chemicals should be used to identify those posing the greatest risk and to force them off the market and out of our food and water until studies can prove their impact to be trivial.”31
The attack on the book was instant and vicious. The Wall Street Journal called it an environmental “hype machine.” The Competitive Enterprise Institute, an industry-funded Washington think tank, released two separate studies attacking the book, as did another libertarian outfit called Consumer Alert, which labeled Our Stolen Future “a scaremongering tract.” The industry-funded Advancement of Sound Science Coalition called a press conference to introduce 10 scientific skeptics who described the book as “fiction.” The American Council on Science and Health (ACSH), another long-standing, industry-funded defender of DDT, dioxin, and other chemicals, obtained a copy of the book in galley form months before publication and prepared an 11-page attack on it before it even hit bookstores. Toxicologist and ACSH member Stephen Safe called the book “paparazzi science.” In a debate with authors Colborn and Myers, ACSH president Elizabeth Whelan even attacked the caution with which the boo
k presented its analysis. “Our Stolen Future uses the word ‘might’ 30 times,” she said. “The word ‘may,’ 35 times. We didn’t bother counting all the ‘could’s.”
Myers replied that he found it ironic to be “now criticized for using ‘might’ and ‘may’ and the caution with which we present some of the discussion. . . . When the book first came out, there were words put in our mouths that concluded we . . . had exaggerated the data. In fact, there were calls made to scientists who had not yet had the opportunity to read the book, and those claims were put in front of them, and of course they responded, ‘That would be ridiculous. That would be unscientific.’ But now that people have had the opportunity to read the book, and have discovered the care with which the arguments are presented, some folks are trying to find other ways to criticize the conclusions by ridiculing the care we take in stating them.”32
The Cure for Prevention
In one of Jack Mongoven’s memos to the Chlorine Chemical Council, he expressed particular alarm at the Clinton administration’s appointment of Dr. Devra Lee Davis to assist in formulating government policy regarding breast cancer. “As a member of the Administration, Davis has unlimited access to the media while her position at the [Department of] Health and Human Services helps validate her ‘junk science,’ ” he wrote. “Davis is scheduled to be a keynote speaker at each of the upcoming . . . breast cancer conferences . . . sponsored by Women’s Economic and Development Organization (WEDO). Each conference is expected to emphasize a regional interest. . . . Topics include ‘Environment and Breast Cancer,’ ‘Organochlorines, Pesticides and Breast Cancer’ and ‘Environmental Justice.’ ”
In response, MBD advised the Chlorine Chemistry Council to shadow and preempt the WEDO conferences. “It is important in all cases to stay ahead of the activists,” he stated, “e.g., get to the New Orleans media and opinion leaders before the Chemical Week Chlorine Conference and the same in each of the cities where WEDO will hold conferences this fall. Let me know if you need more, e.g., we maintain calendars of anti-chlorine events and could include same if you would like.”33 Prior to the 1994 WEDO conference in Dayton, Ohio, Mongoven recommended that the CCC use another of its PR firms, Ketchum Public Relations, to schedule “editorial board meetings in Dayton prior to . . . Davis’ speech,” and “enlist legitimate scientists in the Dayton area who would be willing to ask pointed questions at the conference.”34
Although Mongoven calls Devra Lee Davis a “junk scientist,” she is in fact one of the world’s leading researchers into environmental causes of cancer and chronic disease. The holder of advanced degrees in both physiology and epidemiology, she has taught at the Mt. Sinai Medical Center, Rockefeller University, and other prestigious schools. She is a member of both the American College of Toxicology and the American College of Epidemiology. She has advised leading health officials, including the Surgeon General and the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Women’s Health, on a variety of cancer-related issues, and is the founder of the International Breast Cancer Prevention Collaborative Research Group, an organization dedicated to exploring the causes of breast cancer. An epidemiologist and former senior science adviser at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Department, she has authored more than 140 articles in publications ranging from Scientific American to the Lancet and the Journal of the American Medical Association. She has organized international meetings on the subject of cancer and, as a frequent speaker to women’s groups, is not only a scientist but an activist in the cause of cancer prevention.
Davis’s work is significant—and controversial—because it goes directly to the question of whether environmental factors other than smoking are causing an increase in cancer rates. In 1989, she compiled one of the few systematic comparisons of recent changes in deaths from cancer. Drawing information from millions of death certificates in six industrialized countries, she documented an increase since the 1960s in deaths from breast cancer, brain cancer, kidney cancer, myeloma, melanoma and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. None of these types of cancer had been linked to cigarette smoking. Davis noted also that these increases have occurred during a period when deaths from heart disease—another major disease linked to tobacco—have fallen.35 “Both heart disease and cancer share a number of common causes, including cigarette smoking, heavy alcohol drinking, and possibly diets high in fat and low in fiber and anti-oxidants,” Davis notes. Nevertheless, “trends in these diseases are in opposite directions . . . with heart disease declining, while some forms of cancer are increasing.”36 The trend is not uniform across all age groups. Improvements in treatment have led to dramatic decreases in cancer deaths among children. Death rates have increased, however, in people aged 45 or older. “We’re not talking about small increases here,” Davis says. Since the early 1970s, “some of these cancers have increased 25 percent to more than 200 percent.”37
Breast cancer, in which Davis has taken a particular interest, may be linked to the endocrine-disrupting effects of dioxin and other chemicals. Estrogen, the hormone that makes women feminine, is a well-known breast cancer risk factor. Early menstruation, late menopause, not bearing children, and alcohol use all raise the level of women’s lifetime exposure to estrogen, and they have all been associated with higher-than-average rates of breast cancer. In recent years, research by Davis and other scientists has pointed to synthetic chemicals that Davis calls “xenoestrogens,” meaning “foreign estrogens”—as another risk factor.38 “It seems quite obvious, doesn’t it?” Davis says. “There’s only one common thread tying together all of the known risk factors: The more estrogen exposure in a woman’s life, the greater her risk of breast cancer.” She adds, “We have tended to assume that because estrogen is a hormonal thing, a woman’s thing, there’s nothing we can do about it. Why haven’t we looked at these environmental chemicals that we now know can act like estrogens?”39
Some research into this possibility began in the 1990s. Various studies have found elevated breast cancer rates among women who work in chemical plants or near hazardous waste sites, or whose drinking water has been contaminated with organochlorines. In 1992, Frank Falck, an assistant clinical professor at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine, analyzed tissue samples from 40 women who had biopsies of suspicious breast lumps. Compared with lumps judged benign, those that were cancerous showed much higher levels of organochlorines.40 In a larger study that was published in 1993, biochemist Mary Wolff studied 14,290 women in New York who visited a mammography clinic between 1985 and 1991. She found that breast tissues with cancerous malignancies contained higher concentrations of DDT and PCBs. Women with higher levels of DDE (a breakdown product of DDT) in their blood faced as much as a fourfold increase in their risk of developing breast cancer.41
These results are tentative and scientifically controversial. Most studies, including some in which Wolff also participated, have not found evidence to support the hypothesis that DDT and PCBs increase breast cancer risk.42 What is clear, however, is that in the last 50 years, breast cancer rates have risen dramatically almost everywhere in the industrialized world. In 1960, one woman in 20 in the United States could expect to be diagnosed with breast cancer in her lifetime. Today the number is one in eight. In the United States alone, 1.6 million women currently have diagnosed cases of the disease. Each year, 182,000 new cases are detected, of which 46,000 will lead to death.43
There is no question that the reported rate of breast cancer has been rising. The question is how to interpret this increase. Opponents of the environmental thesis claim that the increase is a statistical artifact due to better medical screening procedures that detect cases of breast cancer which previously would have gone unreported. Davis, however, points to research which shows that even after factors like improved mammography are taken into account, “a sustained one percent annual increase in breast cancer mortality has occurred since the 1940s. Others have also documented increased mortality from breast cancer in a number of industrial countries.”44 And these ar
e studies of deaths from breast cancer, not merely of detected cases. If improved screening saves lives, and if treatment methods are improving, better screening would be expected to cause a decline in the mortality rate.
Davis’s research implies that curtailing pollution is important in order to prevent cancer. “With respect to breast cancer, most of the confirmed risk factors, which relate to reproductive behavior and dietary factors, are not easily changed by social policy,” she observes. “Many of the proposed interventions to reduce breast cancer involve the lifelong use of pharmaceutical agents or the advocacy of radical changes in diet, lifestyle, or even reproductive behavior. As to the latter point, a generation of women that has struggled long for reproductive freedom is unlikely to embrace eagerly suggestions that place constraints on their reproductive choices.”45 Unlike lifestyle factors, however, environmental exposures to xenoestrogens can be changed through policies that place stricter limits on pollution. “We don’t have to wait for conclusive proof,” Davis says. “It took 100 years from the first warnings about tobacco until we finally got tough. We must not wait that long to act against the epidemic of breast cancer.”46
Rather than efforts to identify environmental causes affecting cancer rates, however, much of the scientific research and public discussion has focused on treatments—the so-called “race for the cure.” On paper, about a third of the U.S. National Cancer Institute’s $2 billion annual budget is dedicated to prevention research, but those are “rubber numbers,” according to longtime cancer researcher John C. Bailar III of McGill University. Most of what the institute calls “prevention” is actually basic research into the cellular mechanisms of cancer development rather than epidemiological studies and prevention trials. Research into cellular mechanisms and molecular biology has yet to accomplish much by way of saving lives, but it is politically safe research because it doesn’t rock many boats. A researcher who studies cell biology doesn’t have to risk getting hammered by the tobacco industry, agribusiness, or chemical manufacturers. “The prevention of cancer on a big scale is going to require that we change our habits, change our life styles, clean up the workplace, clean up the environment, change the consumer products that contain hazardous materials,” says Bailar. “It’s going to mean a whole new approach to everyday living.”47
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